Letters to the Editor
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TV set-top boxes
Our cat sleeps on top of the cable box. It's nice and warm 24/7.
If I turned it off, she would go piss in my favorite shoes.
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Good reminder!
I just went around the house plugging things into power strips. Thanks for the reminder!
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kill a watt meter
Our local public library has watt meters that they loan out to patrons for a week at a time, long enough to test just about all the equipment in your house (and return the device so that the next person can use it).
The biggest watt gobbler in our house turned out to be an old refrigerator ($94 of electricity/year). I eventually replaced it with a new one that consumes 40% as much.
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And it works
Haha Garry Owen! (My cat is my heater.)
RC, thanks for this article. I just had the local energy co. install smart switches for everything in this home and this was a good reminder that even the coffeepot is sucking from the energy pool.
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Internalizing Costs
This problem --
"But in their haste to get products onto the market, manufacturers don't make those modest design improvements, and we, the consumers, pay the price in unnecessarily high standby power use."
-- seems to have a fairly simply solution. Internalize those costs by imposing a tax based on the product's energy consumption. If the idea is just to tax inefficient energy use, then each appliance would have to be evaluated against an ideal energy consumption. But that would entail a lot of additional regulatory costs, and maybe it's complicating things too much. How about a straightforward energy consumption tax based simply on the number of kilowatt hours the product consumes?
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Surge does damage too you know
Plugging and unplugging electronic appliances don't do the appliances any favors unless you're investing in expensive power conditioners to front-end the power supply.
Also I would like a better explanation - which ones? The Jenn-Aire cooktop? What do they recommend? Turn it off at the circuit panel? The Fridge? unplug it & watch the freezer thaw out? How much power does a 600w microwave use when it's not running? 2 Watts? What about your computer? Try putting it in suspend mode; there are 6 common levels of suspend. What else?
I'll tell you what uses power: Heat and AC and hot water (if you have an electric HW heater)
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Break the Passive Habits
What a surprise: televisions suck electrical power even when not being watched and suck brainpower when they are watched. I’m not even sure why people still own them.
People should try mentally unplugging everything and then only plugging their toys back in if they would seriously consider powering them by self-generated 100% renewable sources. Such a thought process will either be liberating or demoralizing, depending on your dependence on your toys.
(My family lived in the forest for five years with no electricity and, later, with single digit kwhrs/week from a very small off-the-grid setup. Needless to say, no vampire loads were allowed. No electronic entertainment can really compare to reading Sherlock Holmes aloud by lantern light on a wintry night. Living off-the-grid really forces one to decide which appliances really enhance one’s quality of life and it is amazing how few of our modern contraptions can make the cut.)
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When waste is warmth...
Bear in mind that all the electricity these appliances waste becomes heat.
When the weather is cold, eliminating this waste will increase the amount of money directly spent on heating. At the extreme, if your home is electrically heated, the extra heating cost may cancel out the predicted 'savings'.
But in hot weather, when you are paying for air conditioning rather than for heating, you pay twice for that wasted electricity, first for consuming it (turning it into heat), and then again for the extra electricity your air conditioner uses to get rid of it.
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Inefficient bulbs are a lousy way to heat your home
The heat given off by standard light bulbs doesn't represent a very efficient way to heat your home. See --
http://michaelbluejay.com/electricity/lighting.html
under the heading CFL's have another advantage: they run cooler.
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We need clean energy, not hair shirts
The fact is that the reason nobody cares about this issue is because the expense is minimal. That's all it is, economics. $300 in savings per year (or a lot less, depending on what you have) is not worth me going around flipping switches on and off and not being able to turn things on with the remote anymore.
So, if it's an actual problem what can we do? Raise the price of electricity? Yah, that'll help a lot. If we have clean ways of generating power then this is simply not an issue. The hair shirt environmentalists really want us all to be driving buggies and lighting candles. It's just not going to happen and you can't get people interested in that lifestyle because it wasn't a lot of fun and neither is trying to make sure that all your appliances are really off.
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Getting a power meter is really a good step, but watch that PC.
Getting a power meter is a really good step. You can get good ones for less than $10 and it's an investment that really pays. Because you can take the thing into those giant electronic stores and measure the power consumption of TVs and other devices before buying them. The fun thing is that with this device, you can instantly calculate the yearly power consumtion in dollars - something that could motivate you.
Once you've bought a power meter you will also notice that your PC uses a lot of power, too. By switching to a laptop for most tasks, you'll might save enough energy to run a smaller fridge. My laptop uses 40W, my PC+Screen over 160W. (My fridge is around 110W). Cheaper laptops might use twice as much energy, still you save a lot if you move all your overnight downloading to a laptop computer.
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Office buildings, etc.
In most big cities, the office buildings are lit up like Christmas trees all night long. Imagine how much electricity could be saved if timers and motion detectors were mandatory.
In France, the common area hallways of most apartment buildings, have timer systems for the overhead lights. It takes some getting used to, but it's a very easy way to save major amounts of electricity.
It's great that so many individuals do their part. But in order to really make headway, on the consumption end, the really big users of electricity need to get involved, too.