Curbing Energy Use In Appliances That Are Off 409
KarmaOverDogma writes "The New York Times has an interesting piece on the slow but steady movement to reduce the power drain for appliances that are never truly turned off when they are powered down. In the typical house that's enough to light a 100-watt light bulb 24/7, according to Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratories, a research arm of the Energy Department. In the United States alone, over $1 billion per year is spent powering devices such as TV's VCR's, Computers and Chargers while they are 'off.' Called 'vampires' and 'wall-warts' by Energy Experts, there has been growing support of their recommendations to adopt industry-wide standards, which would require manufacturers to build appliances with significantly lower consumption when not in use."
No Rest for the Wicked... (Score:2, Interesting)
That is just lazy design and very wasteful.
Some things like a Tivo of course need to remain "on" to record upcoming shows, but even then should be in a deep sleep until needed. However, that is not the case. They sit there, actively sucking down juice 24/7/365.
Standby mode to blame? (Score:4, Interesting)
How about circuit breakers in each room? (Score:3, Interesting)
I've audited my home for vampires, and I've since been desoldering leds, and using X10 modules to turn off VCR clocks (I have both a watch and a cellphone - but thanks for the valueadd of a clock on my microwave, coffee maker, vcr, phone, scale, etc.)
$4 a person? (Score:5, Interesting)
The US has about 300 million people. So that's less than $4 per person per year, or 16 bucks for a family of 4. Doesn't seem worth worrying about to me. A family of 4 spends more than that on a single tank of gas for their car.
Wind power (Score:3, Interesting)
Solar power would work too, but I suspect wind would be more powerful with a small generator, but anyone is free to correct me if they know better.
Kill A Watt (Score:5, Interesting)
With electricity prices skyrocketing I'm noticing which lights are on the most and replacing them with full spectrum compact flourescents [fullspectr...utions.com] that have a really nice, white light but use about 1/5 the juice.
power strips (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:No Rest for the Wicked... (Score:5, Interesting)
I've got plenty of wall-worts which suck power, even when nothing is plugged into them, but it's a PITA to unplug them. If the power strips they were plugged into didn't have other electronics plugged in, it'd be easy enough to hit that switch, but who wants a power strip or switch on every single wall-wart they have?
Replacing the power supplies in my PCs with a high efficiency units from Seasonic made a noticable difference. Power draw was reduced 20-30% all the time which is nice.
The charger for my Samsung A670 cell phone is the best, it doesn't use any power when plugged in without the phone. It's so light and small, it doesn't have your typical AC/DC converter in there, not sure how they convert wall power to DC to charge it.
Wall Wart Pet Peeve (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:here ye! (Score:2, Interesting)
I've also heard that its more efficient to leave your computer on all the time because the amount it costs in wear and tear on your computer is more than the power saved by doing it. Anyone hear of this rumor or know anything about it?
Solar roof shingles offset vampires (Score:3, Interesting)
Wouldn't it be nice if the 'Energy experts' spent more time promoting the most obvious source of free power in (and out of) the world; solar power?
Installing just a few solar roof shingles would easily off-set the cost of vampire appliances.
see: http://www.oksolar.com/roof/ [oksolar.com]
Not only do they generate power for your whole household, they end up paying for themselves when you produce a greater current than you are taking in. The energy is sent back to the power line and the energy company pays you.
Re:$4 a person? (Score:5, Interesting)
I'm hardly going to feel bad because my television, stereo, and a few wall-wart power adapters are the equivalent of leaving a lightbulb on. Good god, let's worry about something that really matters, like why this model year's cars use almost as much gas as they got back in 1965. We've gained only a one mile per gallon in efficiency every five years?! WTF?
Re:How low can they go? (Score:3, Interesting)
Totally unlike how American TVs tend to work.
Re:here ye! (Score:3, Interesting)
Hey, guess what: People aren't smart enough to turn off their equipment.
At one place I worked at a few years back, almost all of the CRTs in the offices would sit drawing > 100W each showing screen savers every night and weekend. I usually would at least swing by the lab on my way out each night and turn off about 1000W worth of monitors left on by others.
Al Gore was exactly right. The 2W drawn by a sleeping monitor would come out as a win if even only 10% of the people left their monitors on. And from what I've seen, far more than 10% don't bother to shut off their monitors.
Re:power strips (Score:2, Interesting)
Don't hate me... Love me for breaking your paradigms... Now, give me one of dem nickels!
Optimization (Score:2, Interesting)
-everphilski-
welcome to 2001 (Score:4, Interesting)
George Bush campaigned for this stuff back in the early days. I may not like the guy much, but he was right about this. Companies consistently make their products more power inefficient just to make them cheaper, because very very few people pay attention to efficiency of appliances. They save a few pennies on day 1 and give it back and then some every year.
Energy Star has been incredibly effective. The cheapest refrigerator you buy is within 80% as efficient as the most efficient models. This is definitely not true with many other classes of devices (like lights!).
Bush also inadvertently coined a great spoonerism about power-stealing vampires when talking about this initiative.
Solar vs energy conservation (Score:5, Interesting)
Suppose a transformer wall wart uses 4 watts and you can replace it with a solid-state ferrite switcher that uses .5 watts. It would take nearly 100 dollars of solar panel to do the same thing.
Oh, and about back feeding the line, you could probably get away with a small amount of back feed and just don't tell anyone about it. If you put up a serious solar panel setup and plan to back feed enough that the power company will notice, they get real, real huffy about that. In fact, they are supposed to by law buy back your power, but they really hate that. I was at an alternate energy fair where the local utility was touting their wind mills (you pay extra for the bragging rights of getting "green power"), and when I asked the utility dude about home solar panels and back feeds, he was telling me about all kinds of restrictions (two meter arrangements where you pay more for incoming and get back less on outgoing), and when I mentioned the laws regulating buyback, the fellow got in my face an I thought I would get punched. So much for committment to green power.
light pollution (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:It's about time. (Score:3, Interesting)
On some very low powered devices you can actually get a big increase in battery life by disconnecting the power LED :)
Re:How low can they go? (Score:3, Interesting)
All the TVs in this house have off buttons on the front that power it off so that all it does is remember settings and a standby mode on the controler.
The Foxtel (Sattelite TV) box is always on and sucking juice.
There is a "off" mode but all that really does is shuts down the video output, its still awake and listening to the sattelite (so it can download firmware updates, recieve encryption keys for the channels you are subscribed to and so on as well as notify the central server how much to bill you for PPV etc)
Re:How low can they go? (Score:2, Interesting)
I'm noticing that my brand-new laser printer manages to still make the lights flicker wildly even hours after its LCD screen reads "sleeping...". WTF!?!
Even on a less dramatic scale. I bet things like VCRs draw tons of power while off just due to power supply circuits of a brain-dead design.
For example, I do know that some types of power supplies (switching) are not stable unless a *minimum* amount of current is drawn. I'd guess that some devices either have a "dummy load" to ensure this or use even less efficient techniques of supplying power (such as a resistor divder instead of a transformer). Both result in unnecessary consumption of energy albeit reduced manufacturing cost...
Consider this: Your cell phone is highly energy-efficient. But what motivation is there to produce energy-efficient chargers? NONE, since they rely on wall-power or car-power... Primary motivation for these is cost -> low part count.
Also, I wonder if enough consumer equipment doesn't have power factor correction circuitry to cause a significant amount of waste... Anything with a switching power supply (practically everything electronic these days) would generally have a non-ideal power factor unless it contained *additional* capacitors to correct. I think highly non-ideal power factor devices cause (additional) high amounts of current to flow at certain times (but average to zero). Although they would average out to zero, loss due to resistance in lines causes some energy wasted...
Turning off the powerstrip??? (Score:4, Interesting)
Of course this raises the question, "if they work fine after having no power sent to them, then why are they made to draw power even when they are off???" Can anyone answer that?
I got in the habit when I lived in the dorms in college and could hear the stuff humming while I was trying to sleep and just kept doing it ever since. I suppose it is like these electronic thermostats that seem so popular. My family always just turned it down before the last person went to sleep at night...
Realistically, there are tons of other places that waste much more electricity than appliances. Basically all the buildings at all the universities I've either studies or worked at leave lots of lights on 24/7. During holiday breaks, I've even tried to turn off the lights in the hallway of our dept. office only to come back the next day to find that someone has turned them back on and left them on. Of course that isn't even mentioning the fact that the heat in our building can't be adjusted and so during the winter it is so hot we open the windows in the hall and turn the AC on in our offices (and I do just turn the "Fan" part of the AC unit on since it is winter and cold out, but many of others do actually put the AC on high)...
or the fact that we are told not to turn off our office computers, or the people who live four blocks away but still seem to need to drive to the office...
While I haven't done any calculations on it, I would imagine that fixing the heating in our department building would save more energy than all of the department members unplugging their electonics while not in use...
Re:How low can they go? (Score:3, Interesting)
It used to be common years ago, though. My family had a Panasonic TV that would INSTANTLY display a picture when powered on. No warmup time! If you looked through the vent slots when it was off, you could see the CRT cathode heaters glowing very softly. They glowed dimmer than they did when the TV was on, but they stayed warm enough for an instant image.
The TV had a "vacation" switch on the back that acted as an on/off switch for this feature. When in "vacation" mode, the TV would take about 30 seconds to warm up! I guess older tubes had more thermally massive heaters, and had extreme warmup times, which is why the TVs had this "warm standby" state. New cathodes warm up quickly enough that it's no longer a problem.
-Z
60% of homes heated by natural gas (methane)? (Score:4, Interesting)
Since there are 3600 seconds in an hour an energy consumption of 1 kWh is equivalent to an energy consumption of 3600 kilojoules. Eg - for the units impaired we do this:
kWh => k(W)(h) => k(j/s)(h) => k(j/s)(3600s) => k(j)(3600)(s/s) => 3600 kj = 3.6*10^6j = 3.6e6j (the later being scientific notation)
We know the price of NatGas is 11.41 for 1 MM-btu (10^6 btu = 1e6 btu)
multiply by 1.054615 and we get about $12 bux = 1Gj = 10^9j = 1e9j
divide by 1000 to get: $0.012 = 10^6j = 1e6j
but: kWh = 3.6e6j = 3.6(1e6j) = 3.6 * 0.012 = 4.3 cents.
This is a wholesale price for natgas. Wholesale prices for electricty are about 5 cents per kWh. Delivered prices are about 2x in both cases as well. Check your energy bills.
What this shows is that at present prices, the cost of energy from a source such as delivered natural gas is about the same as the cost of energy from electricty. When you consider that electricty can be used to drive a heat pump (whole house negative fridge) at an overall thermal effciency of upwards of 300% if earth or lake coupled then it is actually cheaper and more energy efficient to heat our homes with electricty rather than natural gas. Ditto with oil.
Now a standard incandecent heater (light bulb) is upwards of 90% efficient. IE - when you run your incandecent heater you leak about 10% or so of the energy in the visible spectrum while the vast majority of the energy is retained as usable heat. Much of the visible light falls on walls and floors and furniture and people and pets and most of this energy is also salvaged eventually as heat. Only that small portion which leaks out of windows is actually lost.
Hense we can say that the heating effciency of an incandecent lightbulb is pretty close overall to 100% so it really is pretty close to being on par with natural gas and other energy sources such as oil.
What this means is that the energy loss from appliances offsets the energy consumption from the furnace and the prices are so close it is more or less a wash. If we check the futures prices on Natural Gas come March we may find the old 100 watt light bulbs are cheaper.
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What these calculations demonstrate is that in the winter heating season the only path to energy conservation is through attention to the building envelope. Energy efficient appliances accomplish next to nothing (in colloqial French Canadian this is loosely translated to SFA).
However in the cooling season in summer the story is a lot different. These applicances during summer add to the cooling load of the building and this load is very considerable. Still in summer if we pay attention again to the building envelope then we can eliminate a huge percentage of the energy that must be pushed out of the building against the thermal gradient by the HVAC system. Note that in this case the Delta-T for an air coupled system might be sitting at say 40F while the Delta-T for an earth or water coupled system might only be 10F.
So energy efficient appliances and lighting starts to make a great deal of sense once we get the building envelope insulation up where it should be which in Northern States and Canada is probably north of R50 in the walls and R70 in the ceilings. Then we can use the electricty saved to run a small earth or water coupled HVAC/Heat pump system and in so doing more or less eliminate the dependancy on Natural Gas and heating oil.
However with the typical homes we live in - especially in the winter time - its a wash. Pay for your energy as electricity or pay for it as Nat Gas.
Re:Yeah and do the math. (Score:2, Interesting)
I can't speak for everyone--and I believe our power consumption is probably below typical American averages--but we use about 11kWh per day. If our wall warts, etc. are really consuming 2.4kWH per day, that's about 22%! If a country needs 22% less energy, that's a big savings in terms of money, infrastructure, and polution.
Now like I said, I realize that we're probably way below the American average. In fact, I just did a quick Google lookup and this link [larimer.org] says the typical American uses 10,000kWh per year--so that'd work out to 27.4kWh/day. So, fine, we use less than half the average. But even so, if the wall warts amount to 2.4kWh/day, that's still close to 10% of the typical American consumers' consumption. That's not insignificant.
Re:here ye! (Score:3, Interesting)
As the grandparent poster was discussing, decent power supplies DO have a hardware switch in the back that disconnects the mains power. Everyone knows the "soft off" button leaves the mobo energized. I always require a hardware switch when shopping for power supplies. I prefer to leave the computers plugged in while I work on them because I like having the chassis grounded.
[Re: Al Gore -- grow up. He was most likely speaking in generics; people do it all the time. Most people, especially groups of college students, are able to understand the difference between a generic statement an a personal accusation. Perhaps now you can see that there are exceptions to every generalization, which is why they're not called "absolutes." ]
Re:fan alternatives (Score:2, Interesting)
Im sure my crappy fans cost me 40 cents extra a month but the initial cost was very low.
If you are talking about just the energy savings you would be better by increasing average automobile mileage by 10%
Re:Stereo (Score:1, Interesting)
Our main TV, a 70 cm 4:3 Philips, draws 60 w when operating and 1 w in standby; I selected this model for its low power consumption.
I think it would help if law made it mandatory to specify in the tech specs of a product and in shops the kWh/year consumed in the 'off' mode
MatN
Re:fan alternatives (Score:3, Interesting)
Honestly, I don't specifically know - I don't work in the fan industry.
But for comparison, I looked up some real numbers. One popular (on Amazon) model of 20" box fan 20" draws 166W for 2220CFM, or 13.4 CFM/W. An 18" oscillating pedestal fan draws 119W for 1970CFM, or 16.6 CFM/W. And a ceiling fan... Energy Star actually rates those, so they have motivation to perform well for the power they draw. And they do - I can't even do a "fair" comparison based on either power or CFM, because the bad ones do over 100 CFM/W, with the best ones passing 200!
Of course, that doesn't address price - Amazon has several models of ceiling fan for under $50. The above-mentioned box fan (the Air King 9723) goes for $39.99. Not pennies, but FAR less of a difference in price than the difference in power consumption.