By John
You have vampires in your house.
They have two teeth and suck power from every room. Cell phone chargers, computers, TVs. Our houses are full of consumer electronics, and the conventional wisdom is that to save energy, you turn them off.
If only it were that simple.
“Idling current” or “standby power” is the technical term for the energy that electronics draw while they are “off.”
The amount of standby power used varies from device to device; a NiCad battery charger – for your cell phone, digital camera, or mp3 player - uses 0.5 watts (one watt is one joule of energy per second); a DVD player uses 1.3 watts; a digital modem uses 9.8 watts; a printer 4.2 watts; a digital cable box uses 19.7 watts.
This translates into an enormous energy drain. According to the International Energy Agency, “recent field studies indicate that between 3 and 13 per cent of residential electricity use in OECD Member countries can be attributed to standby power consumption. That amount is projected to increase substantially with the growing number of electronic devices and the trend to home and office networks.”
“It is estimated that standby power in the residential and commercial sectors combined may account for 2.2 per cent of total OECD electricity consumption and almost 1 per cent of total OECD carbon emissions.”
The International Energy Agency advocates a number of technology-intensive solutions and policy initiatives to combat the vampires. It’s much, much easier than that. Unplug them when they're not in use. Solved.
Use power bars at your outlets, and when you’re not in the room unplug the power bar.
You heard it here first.
All technical and statistical information was taken from: http://www.iea.org/textbase/nppdf/free/2000/blipinthenight01.pdf
A story in the N. Y. Times this morning says the following:
ReplyDelete* Intel is developing a home energy monitor, an energy scoreboard, that will gather information on all the appliances in your home and send it to a monitor on your kitchen wall or counter top. It will tell you which appliances are on and how much it is costing to run them. It will turn appliances on and off when instructed, and suggest ways to change energy use in the house. It is supposed to be fun, and will encourage people to reduce energy use.
* Tenrehte Technologies has developed a device called Picowatt,which plugs into a wall socket, allows people to control lighting and appliances using a smartphone or computer, and calculates information on energy use and sends it via wi-fi to a web page, where you can see energy use in real time and calculate what it is costing to run anything on that plug. Piocowatt will be on sale on April 22, Earth Day, at Best Buy, Amazon, and other outlets.
* Some manufacturers are making appliances that can be adapted to communicate directly with utilities and smart meters. General Electric makes a water heater with a communications port, so it can take advantage of discount rates for off-peak use.
* Sam Six, a utilities software company, is hoping to see devices in the home which can communicate through a wireless network, directly with utility companies. That way, the utility could run appliances at a less expensive time of day. This would mean that utilities could avoid building power stations just for peak demand.