Monitor Draws Zero Power In Standby 405
fifthace writes "A new range of Fujitsu Siemens monitors don't draw power during standby. The technology uses capacitors and relays to avoid drawing power when no video signal is present. With political parties all over Europe calling for a ban on standby, this small development could end up as one of the most significant advances in recent times. The British Government estimates eight percent of all domestic electricity is consumed by devices in standby."
it's got an LED on it, too (Score:4, Interesting)
The monitor might not, but what about the power brick? those things consume power even if no monitor is attached.
Pull the plug (Score:3, Interesting)
Bad power factor is the real problem (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:Holy Shit (Score:3, Interesting)
Have you looked at the oil price lately? Even if you are irrational enough to ignore the mountain of evidence for human caused global warming, you might still want to cut down on your energy bill and/or make the remaining oil on this planet last a little longer.
Re:Bad power factor is the real problem (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:The biggest wastage is in the power supply itse (Score:2, Interesting)
You would just need an RF diode coupled to the video input to be rectified and bias on the gate of a MOSFET that inturn drives a relay to connect mains power to the switchmode PSU.
The crazy thing is, what took me 10 seconds to design in my head will probably be patented, and used to extort millions!!
Remote Conservation (Score:3, Interesting)
It seems to me like some kind of RFID type passive tech could do this with only the power from a RF signal itself to flip the transistors gating the appliance power on/off.
Re:Same thing only different. (Score:3, Interesting)
Safe Sleep [apple.com] is your friend. (May or may not be supported by your particular PB G4, depending on its vintage.)
-Ster
Re:The biggest wastage is in the power supply itse (Score:3, Interesting)
The crazy thing is, what took me 10 seconds to design in my head will probably be patented, and used to extort millions!!
I'm not sure this would work anyway: in order to power the MOSFET, wouldn't you need a power supply of some sort? Maybe if you used a triac instead, something like this might work.
Re:Bad power factor is the real problem (Score:3, Interesting)
That happens for companies already, and I believe even homes in parts of Europe.
Some big-ass capacitors, just like the power companies do already to keep from being overwhelmed.
Funny you should mention it.
Over the past few months, I've been noticing that the vast majority of household devices have a power supply in some form. And even some that don't, like incandescent light bulbs and space heaters, don't need very clean power. It seems that if you're planning on running on batteries for some reason, for 75%+ of devices in your home, you'd be much better off getting an inverter that outputs a simple square wave. You can eliminate all the fancy circuitry and losses involved in generating a clean sine wave, reducing the cost of the inverter, and giving all your CF bulbs, PSUs, wall-warts, etc. a perfect 1.0 power factor.
You'll still want, say, 1 outlet in every room driven from a second (but can be much lower capacity) inverter that generates sine-wave A/C. Anything that has a motor that runs directly from A/C will have much, much less power if driven from a square wave. That means your vacuum, fans, (most) air conditioners, swamp coolers, (full-size) refrigerators, etc. Power tools are an open question, anything with brushes and/or variable-speed control will probably work fine, but there are certain to be some that will not... The (absolutely baffling) popularity of cordless tools makes this partially moot as well.
This doesn't help, of course, with any power you're drawing directly off the grid.
Re:power isnt free (Score:3, Interesting)
Congratulations. You may well be the first non-idiot to post a reply to this story. It's been a painful read to see so much ignorance and stupidity getting points.
Indeed... Solar panels aren't cheap, though, and I thought of something else. A computer monitor has no point in turning on when there's no signal, so why not power the relay from the VGA/DVI cable? Just siphon off a little bit of power, enough to charge a tiny capacitor, throw the relay, and start-up the monitor.
The same trick wouldn't work for TV monitors, unfortunately.
Re:The biggest wastage is in the power supply itse (Score:3, Interesting)
VGA gets you 1V peak-to-peak at 75 ohms impedance (13 milliamps, probably per color). DVI gives you 5VDC @ 50mA through pins 14 and 15. The latter can drive a relay directly, the former would probably need a voltage multiplier circuit (which at those low voltages could probably be embedded on an IC, in fact you'd probably have to use schottky diodes) to charge a capacitor. Then you could use a voltage comparator op amp to dump the capacitor's energy into the relay quickly.
Re:Annoying blue LEDs (Score:3, Interesting)
Back in the day, devices came with nice red LEDs that didn't ruin your night vision. A nice coincidence with the fact that red ones were the first/easiest LEDs to make.
One problem with blue LEDs is that the human eye has poor sensitivity to blue, at least resolution-wise. There's a great example of this problem here in Jyvaskyla, a bicycle counter installed in a cycle path (probably using some inductive effect for detection, and intended to collect statistics for traffic planning). Its display consists entirely of blue LEDs, which probably looks cool to some people, but it's very hard to read, kind of defeating the purpose.
Ob. Mac Fanboi post... (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:These people are idiots (Score:1, Interesting)
Not trolling, but genuinely interested...
I was at Home Depot last week, and they do have a/c units under 13SEER.
Don't remember the exact number, but there were under 10SEER units.
Small, 5,000BTU units with under 10SEER.
As to a/c units over 20SEER, please provide a link.
The most I've seen is 16.
Finally, the SEER rating is confusing as shit.
I read the wikiPedia entry, and had to read it again to comprehend.
Thanks man for any replies.
Re:Annoying blue LEDs (Score:2, Interesting)
What's going on is that your eyes adjust how much light to let in based on, mostly, the blue part of the spectrum. Quite possibly this has something to do with the blue sky. If you live outdoors, the brightness of the sky is what is mainly controlling what you can see. This also lets you see incredibly well under a full moon.
If you have a blue light and a red light with the same candlepower, and light a room with each, each room is equally bright in the absolute sense. But in the blue room, your irises are closed too much relative to the room light, whereas in the red room they're open too much. (So you can see a lot better in the dark, although very strong red light can actually be dangerous as your eyes stupidly do not iris closed as much as they should.)
Or, to put it another way, your eyes take the blue light, multiple it by three, and assume that's how much RGB light is in the room. Roughly. It's probably more like R: 0.3 G: 0.7 B: 2.0, I'm sure the real numbers are out there somewhere.
There's a reason lights just offstage at a theatre are often blue...you can't see as well under them (Just well enough to avoid running into people.), but it 'ruins your night vision', or, in other words, 'fixes your day vision before you walk on stage into the lights'. (While at the same time, they're dim enough that you can't actually see into them from the house.)
Whereas, if you go further backstage, you'll find red ones, when people actually do need to operate with night vision.
And sometimes you find green ones. I haven't quite figured that one out. Hunters use green, I don't know why either. Possibly because so many animals are colorblind, so maybe it works like red and doesn't affect their 'eye brightness'. Whereas I know, with people green does actually affect it somewhere.