[HN Gopher] No, you can't save PS30 per year by switching off yo...
___________________________________________________________________
No, you can't save PS30 per year by switching off your "standby"
devices
Author : tosh
Score : 253 points
Date : 2022-04-27 11:09 UTC (11 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (shkspr.mobi)
(TXT) w3m dump (shkspr.mobi)
| lbriner wrote:
| Definitely annoying when "official" looking stats are not just a
| bit out of date but sometimes are completely wrong. Then a tonne
| of the uneducated take these things as gospel and either tout
| them to their friends or perhaps start breaking switches by
| turning everything off all the time.
|
| How much to replace a broken socket? Probably about PS100 by an
| Electrician!
|
| The guy from the energy savings trust also mentions "Even the
| standby light on your TV takes up energy"! An LED? Seriously? So
| the crazy advice is switch the TV off at the wall instead. What
| happens then? Every time you switch it on you have to wait for
| longer for the PC inside it to boot properly and connect to the
| network, using much more energy than a tiny LED!
| vrfvr wrote:
| When your PC doesn't need to boot when not disconnecting it
| from the grid, it means that there is more than a LED being
| powered
| sdflhasjd wrote:
| That LED by itself obviously doesn't use a lot of power, but it
| does imply more usage by other components.
|
| Last year I got a thermal camera to help with some insulation
| in my old house, but it's great for literally _seeing_ this
| standby usage. The TV, when off, is around 2 degrees above
| ambient.
|
| The author of the article laughs at the mention of the VCR, but
| doesn't acknowledge that we might be wasting more energy with
| newer gadgets.
|
| Every "IoT" device that runs of mains power seems to have very
| inefficient power supplies, because they are regularly warm to
| the touch even when doing nothing: Smart bulbs (by far the
| worst), Alexa, Fire/Google TV sticks, etc.
| eropple wrote:
| _> Smart bulbs (by far the worst)_
|
| Maybe some. On the other hand, the Hue sitting here is cold
| to the touch when not emitting light and is drawing about
| 0.4W right now--I checked.
| mordae wrote:
| 0.4W is a lot.
|
| WiFi-connected ESP32 draws about 140 mA. esp8266 will be
| similar. They are both 3.3V devices.
|
| 3.3 * 0.140 = 0.46
|
| Your light bulb's esp8266 (or a similar chip, zigbee is 2.4
| GHz as well) is fully powered.
|
| With a switching power supply and proper light sleep you
| should see about 1/10 of that.
|
| API reference:
| https://docs.espressif.com/projects/esp8266-rtos-
| sdk/en/late...
|
| Sleep impact: https://github.com/chaeplin/esp8266_and_ardui
| no/tree/master/...
| eropple wrote:
| Huh--I was certain it could be better, though I didn't
| realize it was that high! On the other hand, my
| electricity is hydro and it costs like $0.009 per
| kilowatt-hour.
| ericpauley wrote:
| > Fire/Google TV sticks
|
| Are you saying the device itself is warm or the power supply?
| If it's the device it can't be caused by an inefficient power
| supply because the supply is external.
| sdflhasjd wrote:
| I mention power supplies in both the colloquial sense, but
| also the power supply circuitry - I know things like the
| ESP chips themselves don't use much power.
|
| As for my Google TV: the PSU is integrated, so I can't
| tell.
| PaulHoule wrote:
| A device that's designed to handle 200W power peak might
| have a power supply which is 95% efficient, but it might
| be that you're paying that 5% all the time.
|
| (If, for instance, there is a big-ass transformer with a
| lot of iron in it you are making magnetic domains flip
| back and forth whenever the device is plugged in.)
|
| The standby mode might use 0.2W but the device burns 10W
| in the power supply.
|
| Old power supplies used ideas from analog electronics: if
| the voltage regulator was reducing the voltage from 10V
| to 9V then you are directing that extra volt (10% of the
| energy) into a resistor. More modern power supplies use
| digital ideas such that transistors are fully on or fully
| off. Because they waste less energy they have an easier
| time getting rid of heat, so they can be dramatically
| lighter and smaller... but more expensive.
|
| Other answers would be to add a second smaller power
| supply for the standby mode or run the standby mode off a
| battery or super-capacitor that charges intermittently.
|
| The cost of those improvements would definitely be
| noticed by the manufacturer and the consumer at the time
| of purchase. The consumer might not notice a small
| increase in the electric bill, even if it adds up to a
| lot over time, because it is against a high and noisy
| background.
| mordae wrote:
| You have it right.
|
| Many cheap always-connected smart devices use Low-dropout
| regulator (LDO). What does wiki say about these?
|
| > The advantages of an LDO regulator over other DC-to-DC
| voltage regulators include the absence of switching noise
| (as no switching takes place), smaller device size (as
| neither large inductors nor transformers are needed), and
| greater design simplicity (usually consists of a
| reference, an amplifier, and a pass element). The
| disadvantage is that, unlike switching regulators, linear
| DC regulators must dissipate power, and thus heat, across
| the regulation device in order to regulate the output
| voltage.
|
| See for example:
| https://templates.blakadder.com/athom_PG01EU16A.html
|
| You can clearly see an AMS1117 (a super popular LDO),
| right next to the ESP board on lower right.
|
| Most LDOs have a chunk of metal tinned to the board so
| that the copper layer can help with heat dissipation. You
| can quickly identify them by this design.
|
| Here is another one on a dev board: https://hallroad.org/
| images/watermarked/thumbnails/465/465/d...
|
| More on the topic:
| https://www.digikey.com/en/articles/use-adjustable-low-
| leaka...
| CaptArmchair wrote:
| To my mind, advising people to "turn them completely off" is
| only part of the story. The other part is questioning why
| they are that wasteful in the first place.
|
| One explanation might be that it's a side effect of designing
| them to make their development and production cost effective.
|
| In that regard, I wonder to what extent consumer protection
| regulations would be helpful e.g. clamping down on the
| production of consumer electronics that consume certain
| wattage per hour without any proper justification.
| masklinn wrote:
| There is something to be said for disconnecting or hibernating
| devices, either because they do consume a fair bit, or because
| lots of device consume a lot more than you'd expect on standby.
|
| The proper thing to do is to check them with a kill-a-watt or
| similar, and make the decision on a case-by-case basis.
|
| Plus it's fun checking your various devices.
|
| E.g. a desktop PC might clock in at 100W when unused depending
| on the components, so if it's not _necessary_ hibernating it at
| night is a significant gain (if it has a working hibernate
| mode) for very little inconvenience.
|
| There are also devices which you only use once a month but
| sleep in at a few watts, completely unnecessarily.
| xattt wrote:
| If you don't have a Kill-a-Watt device, you would at least
| feel 100W waste heat.
|
| Does your PC get that hot?
| Gigachad wrote:
| You might not. Given enough fans on the case they basically
| always feel cold. Mine isn't particularly crazy but at 100%
| utilization it would be using about 400w and it feels cold
| on the fan exhausts. You'll notice the room heat up though.
| masklinn wrote:
| > If you don't have a Kill-a-Watt device, you would at
| least feel 100W waste heat.
|
| You would not, 100W not that much heat unless the room is
| very hot or it's blown straight into your face (but even
| middling desktops tend to have very large fans, and will
| generally send the heat away from you, either towards a
| wall or to the ceiling directly).
|
| 100W is about what a human produces at rest.
| qayxc wrote:
| > 100W is about what a human produces at rest.
|
| Which is why humans are quite "warm to the touch", so
| yes, you'd _definitely_ feel that.
| masklinn wrote:
| > Which is why humans are quite "warm to the touch", so
| yes, you'd definitely feel that.
|
| The original comment didn't specify "to the touch".
| Furthermore a (again) well-ventilated case will quickly
| expel heat, the case of my desktop PC is colder than
| ambient temp (that it's aluminium and steel doesn't help
| with heat retention either). I _might_ feel some heat if
| I put my hands in the exit airflow, but even that is not
| a given: at a mere 100W the windchill of the back fan is
| likely sufficient to counteract the actual heat.
| xattt wrote:
| If you don't have a Kill-a-Watt device, you would at least
| feel 100W waste heat.
| nicoburns wrote:
| > E.g. a desktop PC might clock in at 100W when unused
| depending on the components
|
| 100W when unused! What on earth causes that? My laptop draws
| 100W under full load.
| thescriptkiddie wrote:
| Hard drives and monitors, mostly.
| Y-bar wrote:
| My 9700K desktop draws 45-50W (excluding monitor) when
| idle. Main usage is:
|
| - GPU at about 11-15W
|
| - Fans on motherboard and case 7-10W
|
| - Disks (1 HDD, 2xSSD): 5-10W
|
| - Peripherals (keyboard, mouse, headset, ...) 2-5W
|
| - CPU 5-15W
|
| I can imagine a scenario with additional peripherals,
| beefier GPU, more PCI cards, more disks could absolutely
| reach upwards to 100W.
| ascagnel_ wrote:
| What power level is the system at? That sounds reasonable
| for a system that's in its active mode (ACPI S0) but not
| under load, but would be extremely high for any other
| sleep mode (S1-S5).
| Gigachad wrote:
| Gaming desktops are extremely inefficient. My new AMD GPU
| claims to be using 30w while at 0% utilization. You also
| have all the fans which don't turn of when they really
| could half the time. As well as often multiple hard drives
| plugged in.
|
| It's just that no one really cares about power usage on a
| desktop because its plugged in and doesn't cost all that
| much if you turn it off while not using it. I think modern
| windows may even try to automatically suspend the system to
| actually turn the gpu and fans off.
| nicoburns wrote:
| Ok, so we're talking more like on-but-idle rather in
| sleep mode? Still seems like a lot, but more reasonable.
| outworlder wrote:
| Utilization is never 0% though. There's a lot of
| housekeeping activities that prevent components from
| being powered down.
|
| They do care about desktops, but not as much as laptops
| obviously. It's all about compromises.
|
| Fans don't draw very much at low speeds, but you can turn
| most off (except the CPU fans unless you have a large
| heatsink).
| BolexNOLA wrote:
| Ever since's Apple standardize having SSD's in their
| computers, I've been trying to be better about shutting off
| my computer at the end of the day. It boots up so quickly
| compared to HDD's it's hard for me to justify not doing it. I
| don't think my laptop or mini take more than 15 seconds to be
| up and running.
| everdrive wrote:
| It's easy enough to plug a power strip into wall socket and
| simply turn off the power strip when not in use. I'm not
| suggesting that this means the passive power draw of these
| devices is enough to warrant the effort. However, it's also
| effortless just to turn off the power strip when not watching
| TV. We only watch TV once or twice a week, and have a pretty
| unusual setup:
|
| - large CRT
|
| - VCR
|
| - DVD player
|
| Given the ancient appliances, and how infrequently we watch TV,
| it does actually pay off to disconnect them via a surge
| protector.
| woliveirajr wrote:
| This. Some things have a kind of "hidden cost" that aren't
| considered when doing those savings maths.
|
| The cost of turning up some "microCPU" vs. the cost of the led
| + sleeping sycles. The pollution cost of slowing down, stoping,
| driving again vs. stoping on bumpers. The costs of keeping the
| same old refrigerator vs. energy savings during 5 years.
| pbhjpbhj wrote:
| If you think that a PC maintains a network connection only by
| keeping an LED lit then either your analytic abilities aren't
| up to this discussion and/or you're being purposefully
| disingenuous.
|
| >How much to replace a broken socket? //
|
| So, waste electricity because the 5C/ socket switch might
| break?
|
| What's wrong with turning things off when you're not using
| them.
| Havoc wrote:
| Kinda depends on the device. My desktop is at 5W for sleep state
| which equals around 10 quid per year if my napkin math isn't
| failing me (5 * 730 * 12 *0.23 /1000). So 30 for a household
| doesn't seem impossible
|
| Then again that is acceptable to me. Recently realised that
| leaving it on overnight at 150W idle isn't the best of moves
| though so now using sleep. Still not quite clear to my why it is
| idling that high for relatively modern gear.
| jason0597 wrote:
| The actual sad thing here is that incomes have stagnated so much
| in the UK and the cost of living has skyrocketed so quickly, that
| people are desperate to save even _PS30 /year_
|
| That's approximately equal to 3hrs worth of minimum wage work
| (PS9.50/hr), and people are that desperate? But it makes sense
| when you realise that the median wage in the UK is ~PS24k/yr...
| TazeTSchnitzel wrote:
| > incomes have stagnated so much
|
| I don't think it's about income change so much as what income
| bracket you fall into to begin with. An upper-middle-class
| person with a stagnant income won't worry about PS30/year. But
| people living in relative poverty (a huge segment of the
| population) will regardless of how the economy is going.
| Nebasuke wrote:
| Median incomes really are stagnating. See e.g.
| https://blogs.lse.ac.uk/politicsandpolicy/real-wages-and-
| liv...
|
| That's until 2015 and doesn't even take the recent energy
| hikes into account.
| pessimizer wrote:
| Upper-middle class incomes are not stagnating. That leaves
| 90% of people with stagnating incomes.
| jahnu wrote:
| If you make say 10 relatively simple adjustments to your life
| like this then it ( at the risk of being boringly obvious :) )
| would be 300 a year which becomes much more significant.
|
| So learning about them is important or you can't make any
| adjustments.
| blitzar wrote:
| If you cut out the take-away coffee and avocado on toast and
| you will have enough to buy many houses.
|
| Apparently going without 24,499 times would mean you have
| enough to put down a deposit for the average first time buyer
| in London.
| jacquesm wrote:
| If you made 100 such adjustments it would be 3000!
|
| And so on... but really: how many such adjustments can you
| make? And how much inconvenience will that cause?
| jahnu wrote:
| Well if you want to be silly about it, sure. (I even put in
| a friendly note to hopefully avoid such comments). But if
| we remain sensible then there is quite likely room for a
| dozen or so such adjustments in many lives where the
| inconvenience is negligible in proportion to the potential
| gains.
| electroly wrote:
| Could you name, say, two more? Reducing your use of
| heating or AC is the only other similar adjustment I can
| think of. I don't think 10 such adjustments exist.
| jahnu wrote:
| I'll name the ones I do myself
|
| - Reduce heating as you suggested (we have a crisis going
| on in Europe and I reduced it even more recently)
|
| - Drive a little slower
|
| - Make sure I check for discounts at the supermarket and
| plan accordingly
|
| - Try to fill the dishwasher optimally
|
| - Cook more vegetarian meals
|
| - Check used goods online markets before buying new
|
| And that's just a quick list
| electroly wrote:
| Those go far, far beyond the negligible impact of turning
| off your devices when you're not using them. Nobody is
| claiming that it's impossible to save money. We're saying
| there are a limited number of options with negligible-to-
| no impact to you. Most of the things you mentioned are
| absolutely not worth it to me, I'd rather not save the
| money.
| jahnu wrote:
| It not about you It's about people for whom 300 a year is
| not negligible For those people the things I listed are
| worth doing and negligible effort compared to the reward
|
| I don't understand why this is so hard to get
| jacquesm wrote:
| Because most people who need to make such adjustments
| have already made them.
| electroly wrote:
| Again, nobody is saying it's impossible to save money.
| That would be ridiculous. We're saying that there are few
| low-hanging fruits that have negligible or no impact on
| your life. The word "negligible" here is applying to the
| impact on your life by doing the cost-saving thing, not
| on the dollar amount savings that you get by doing it.
| Turning off devices when you're not using them is one;
| you're literally not using it, it doesn't impact you by
| being off instead of on standby. It's like free money.
| Switching to a more vegetarian diet is, and I hope this
| is obvious, much more impactful and more of a life
| change. Obviously you can save money with life changes.
| jacquesm wrote:
| > But if we remain sensible then there is quite likely
| room for a dozen or so such adjustments in most lives
| where the inconvenience is negligible.
|
| I doubt that. Which is my point. You can try to forestall
| 'such comments' but then you probably should show where
| you believe 10 (or even more) such adjustments with
| negligible inconvenience can be made in the life of the
| people for who this sort of advice would matter. Because
| I don't believe that to be the case.
| nicoburns wrote:
| If you have a low income, then potentially much less
| inconvenience than not being able to afford things that you
| need.
| willnonya wrote:
| So your position is that a majority of people in the UK are so
| desperate for an extra PS2.5 a month that they're willing to
| follow asinine advice like this?
|
| People living under bridges would scoff at that much less the
| population of an affluent, technologically and image obsessed
| culture like the UK.
| AussieWog93 wrote:
| One of my old coworkers actually went around with a plug-in power
| meter and measured what all of his appliances were using.
|
| Ended up knocking something like $800/year off of his energy
| bill.
|
| That's not to say that certain modern devices aren't highly
| efficient in standby, but to call this a fraud just doesn't seem
| right at face value.
| sandworm101 wrote:
| Be very careful about some of these articles. The general ideas
| are basically correct, but exact numbers are subject to huge
| error bars. Your typical clam-type meter will easily be off by
| 5-10%, possibly much more at very low amperages in a household
| environment. So articles written by well-meaning tech writers
| measuring their computer with a 50$ clamp meter should be taken
| with a grain of salt. They are really not designed to properly
| measure anything less than a few amps.
| iSloth wrote:
| Strange, I've had a very different experience to the author of
| this, I've actually got a similar spreadsheet I may clean-up and
| post to show another view point, however in summary.
|
| A couple of months ago I went on a little mission around the
| house testing the power consumption of devices on standby, as I
| noticed through my energy monitor that idle power consumption was
| about 0.4-0.5kW while everyone was sleeping at night, which
| seemed high to my research of national averages.
|
| To my surprise a number of fairly modern devices I found to have
| utterly terrible standby power consumption, the new buttonless
| electric hob in my kitchen, the two monitors for my PC on
| standby, the TV & Blu-ray player and an Aircon unit just to name
| a few.
|
| Since then I used a few Sonoff relays around the house to add
| these to Alexa, the results were actually quite amazing really,
| about PS10 per week of electricity saved, so PS30-PS40 per
| month...
|
| So in short, if your similar to me you can actually save PS300 a
| year, I think the key take away here is clamp/monitor your own
| devices and take a judgement from there, no one house/setup is
| the same.
|
| ---
|
| Edit, here's a very quick screenshot of the spreadsheet and data
| I've got to hand at the moment, in time I'll get something better
| cleaned up and together.
|
| https://imgur.com/a/l4xMwbo
| Terry_Roll wrote:
| > idle power consumption was about 0.4-0.5kW while everyone was
| sleeping at night
|
| Thats quite high, I'll be checking our inverter now as its an
| air source heater and air con unit rolled into one.
|
| Our biggest energy savers have been one of these
| (https://www.screwfix.com/p/lap-digital-immersion-
| timer/1804r...) at shoulder height in an easy to access
| location, on for 1.5hrs during the last part of Economy 7 night
| time tariff and then switched on when ever hot water is needed
| on a demand driven basis, switched off when its finished with
| although it cuts out after 1 or 2hrs anyway if we forget.
|
| Thing is most appliances have a timer and heat water when it
| needs it, so they go on during Economy 7 anyway.
|
| Talking to a washing machine/tumble dryer engineer the other
| day, the condensing tumble dryers seem to be energy saving
| because they dont heat the clothes up so a saving is made by
| not shrinking the clothes exposed to too much heat and they run
| at ambient air temps extracting moisture so the dry clothes
| much like hanging them out on the line.
|
| The other major energy saver which means we dont have the air
| con on during the summer months in the UK (desert climate
| location in the UK - yes one exists believe it or not) is these
| black out blinds.
| https://www.blocblinds.co.uk/window_blinds/blocout_info?sour...
|
| They sit flush with the internal wall so you can still have
| stuff on your window ledge, but by being flush with the
| internal wall means its more like triple glazing. They keep the
| warmth in during the winter because its very cold over night in
| the countryside and they keep the heat out during the summer so
| much so that some days when I would have put the air con on, I
| dont need to, or I only put the air con on for the afternoon,
| its temperature controlled anyway so it cuts in when it wants.
| And when the air con is on, the whole house is at 18 degrees C
| according to the downstairs central heating thermostat, its at
| the top of the stairs keeping bedrooms cold and the cold sinks
| down the stairs which keeps the downstairs cold, thats works
| brilliantly especially during heatwaves!
|
| You also get fantastic sleep during the summer months as well!
| Cant stress that enough! We all have individual bedrooms due to
| different work schedules and I love my sleep, but you cant see
| anything in the room at midday in the middle of summer, you
| cant even see your hand in front of your face, they block out
| that much light. Its bliss!
|
| Those have been our two biggest energy savers, and we have
| solar panels, a loft full of insulation, insulated cavity
| walls, fancy gas in the double glazing etc etc. Little short of
| dumping some of the time saving gadgets, I dont think we could
| save any more energy.
| MomoXenosaga wrote:
| Those cable TV boxes that they give out are terrible outdated
| cheap pieces of shite and have notoriously bad power
| consumption.
|
| Considering it is impossible to know what kind of appliances
| folks have in their homes the article is odd.
| silexia wrote:
| The Keurig is the worst offender... Enormous energy is expended
| to keep your water hot 24/7.
| brnt wrote:
| My Quooker does too, keep a reservoir permenantly at 110C. It
| only uses 10W thanks to its insulation though. Surprising
| Keurig didn't think of that. Then again, they've mostly
| seemed to have thought about taking your money.
| willcipriano wrote:
| I just got one but the Zojirushi hot water dispenser can keep
| 4 liters of water hot for 31 - 48 watts or so. What does the
| Keurig use?
|
| https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B00R4HKIV8/ref=ppx_yo_dt_b.
| ..
| masklinn wrote:
| Zojs are well insulated hot water dispensers, a keurig is a
| pod-type coffee machine, so I assume it's just an un-
| insulated plastic reservoir (though hopefully it doesn't
| keep the entire reservoir hot, only the water for the "next
| dose" for people who can't cope with waiting 30 seconds for
| the machine to heat up)
| Scoundreller wrote:
| I really wish keurig would just have a big capacitor
| inside to insta-heat the water beyond what's possible
| from mains in real-time. But I guess there's too much
| risk of shocky shock.
| masklinn wrote:
| > I really wish keurig would just have a big capacitor
| inside to insta-heat the water beyond what's possible
| from mains in real-time. But I guess there's too much
| risk of shocky shock.
|
| I'm not sure that's an option unless you have a capacitor
| larger than the device. Heating water takes a lot of
| energy: let's say we're talking 200mL water (0.2kg),
| ambient temperature is 20C, water has a specific heat of
| 4.2kg/kg.C, so that's 67200J.
|
| A Maxwell K2 3000f 3.0v would store a hair under 13500J,
| which isn't even remotely close, and these things are
| huge (https://youtu.be/y8tQesYvCig?t=10), heavy (>500g),
| and each would be a significant fraction of the keurig's
| existing price.
|
| If you need to strap 5 capacitors to the keurig, danger
| aside, you've added 2.5kg to the thing, you've strapped a
| pack twice the size of the brewer, and you've at least
| doubled and probably close to tripled its price.
| iSloth wrote:
| Very true - To be honest at the point I knew the house
| consumption and hadn't yet clamped individual devices I had
| expected to find a single culprit like that, or even a faulty
| device with earth leakage that was affectively dumping the
| current for no real purpose.
|
| I should have also pointed out, I really do wish more devices
| would have more physical power switches where it makes sense
| - As an example the washing machine has a touch sensitive
| main power button, yet our tumble dryer (same manufacture &
| design) has a more physical on/off switch - The former uses a
| decent amount of standby power, the second uses none, the
| only real purpose I see is a slightly more "premium" feel to
| the washing machine.
| verall wrote:
| Mains power switches are a wear item and can withstand like
| 10-100x less on/off cycles than a simple button that
| controls some 3.3V gpio on a microcontroller.
| lmt55 wrote:
| A cheap mains power switch from 30-40 years ago had no
| problem being cycled once or twice a day for 30-40 years
| without ever failing. This is not a binding constraint.
| s1mon wrote:
| Do you have stats on this? I've developed coffee makers and
| other appliances. Yes, there's often a mode where the boiler
| keeps warm for some amount of time after the first cup is
| made. The first cup can take minutes to heat up, and the
| second is often much shorter. Then there's a certain amount
| of time where the preheat is left on, and eventually it's
| turned off if the coffee maker isn't used again. Different
| models/makes have different algorithms and modes, but this is
| a common pattern. There are energy conservation standards
| which also come in to play, so unless we're taking about a
| commercial machine, I don't think anything current will just
| keep the preheat on forever.
| mikepurvis wrote:
| I wouldn't have believed it either, and yet:
|
| "Keurig brewers - unless turned off - continuously heat the
| water inside the heating tank even when the brewer is
| sitting idle. Some Keurigs such as K-Cafe and K-Elite
| feature an auto-off function that switches off the brewer
| two hours after its last brewing to save on energy."
|
| I guess if your machine is trashing the planet with plastic
| waste anyway, why not also trash it on the energy
| consumption side? What a disaster.
|
| ref. https://kahawaplanet.com/does-keurig-boil-water-how-
| to-get-h...
| Finnucane wrote:
| I keep an electric kettle and Melitta pour-over on my
| desk at work. It is on when I turn it on, then it is off.
| The Keurig has always seemed like kind of a bad deal.
| mikepurvis wrote:
| I guess you could make a case for this kind of thing in a
| breakroom or something where it's going to be in use all
| day, but then again, that's also the scenario where it
| would make the most sense to just be continuously brewing
| whole pots of coffee in a conventional drip machine.
|
| Either way, a Keurig in a home, only brewing once or
| twice a day? The worst.
| rhino369 wrote:
| My keurig would keep it hot for weeks. How much energy that
| actually wasted, I'm not really sure.
| IMSAI8080 wrote:
| I have some questions about your figures:
|
| - You've included the fridge, that's not really "standby" power
| in the sense OP is meaning. That's active power consumption.
| Fridges don't have a standby mode. - As above you've included
| air conditioning. That looks like active power with a pump
| running, not standby power. I cannot envisage any way you could
| get that consumption in standby. I think you've made a mistake
| with that. - Why did you measure the Alexa with a toaster and a
| clock connected to it? The Alexa is 2W max. Is this toaster
| some kind of smart device? A normal toaster is either on or
| using zero power. Do clocks have a standby mode? I don't
| understand that. - What's the iMac power consumption mean? It
| uses 6.6W shutdown or in hibernate? That seems unlikely. - Are
| you sure you've switched these speakers into standby? That
| looks like they're switched on and active. - What are the
| lighting figures? Regular lights are zero switched off. Are
| these remote controlled or wi-fi lights maybe? - Your door bell
| is seriously using 10 watts? Are you sure? Do you mean is this
| actually a camera or something? - You've got eight devices
| involved with delivering your wi-fi and network (four access
| points, 2 switches, a router and a controller) . That's
| probably more than average and it's arguable whether that's
| really standby power as such in the sense OP means. - It was
| measured with some form of clamp meter. Have you checked that
| with a multimeter to see if that's really accurate? A consumer
| one may not be that good.
| karmakaze wrote:
| I would interpret these devices as being in a low-power usage
| mode where we wouldn't expect high power draws, rather than
| literally a 'standby mode'. A clock certainly falls in this
| category. A fridge if it hasn't been opened in hours and has
| good insulation could even fall here as well overnight, etc.
| Sure there are power spikes but the important thing is the
| amortized consumption.
| ubercow13 wrote:
| But you cant turn off your fridge at the wall so what's the
| point in measuring it?
| masom wrote:
| Measuring your fridge is important as it could point to a
| bad compressor or bad seals.
|
| Your fridge compressor shouldn't be running 24/7, and it
| should mostly be on standby until temperature rises.
| zelon88 wrote:
| The point is measuring the consumption of a device while
| you do not need it and it is not performing any
| meaningful work.
|
| Your fridge is never in that state. Even when the
| compressor is not working, the fridge is still
| functioning and performing work. It is sensing
| temperature and pressure and time and then making
| decisions based on those inputs.
|
| Your laptop is not performing meaningful work when it is
| updating while you are away. It can do that in the
| background while you look at cat pictures.
| robonerd wrote:
| > _the fridge is still functioning and performing work.
| It is sensing temperature and pressure and time_
|
| I believe most fridges use bimetallic thermostats to
| control a relay to power the pump. And they don't sense
| pressure or keep track of time.
| zelon88 wrote:
| Have you ever tried to start a super old fridge or AC
| that you unplugged without waiting the full 3 minutes
| before plugging back in? It sounds like a diesel truck
| shutting off in your kitchen.
|
| Modern fridges absolutely keep track of pressure and
| time.
| robonerd wrote:
| No, I admit I've never powercycled a fridge nor ever seen
| a reason to.
|
| Can you explain the mechanism by which a fridge unplugged
| then replugged a minute later sounds like a diesel truck?
| The compressor pumps aren't continuous duty, they spend
| most of the time powered off anyway.
|
| edit: I did some web searching and the only mention of
| wait times before plugging in a fridge I can find is
| waiting a few hours before plugging in a fridge _if_ it
| was stored on its side. Unless you 're also flipping your
| fridge over when you power cycle it, I don't understand
| why there should be any problems.
| Izkata wrote:
| It's not specific to fridges, you'll find more results
| looking for AC/compressors in general:
| https://skeptics.stackexchange.com/questions/4695/do-air-
| con...
| blihp wrote:
| Depends on whether or not you have a fancy 'smart'
| fridge, in which case it could very easily be in a state
| where it is consuming power without performing any
| meaningful work. A lot of these IoT devices, while low
| power vs a traditional PC, are not efficient.
| yason wrote:
| Measuring standby power matters where the alternate
| option would be to unplug the device or use an extension
| cord with a power switch instead of relying on an active
| but low-power state.
| iNerdier wrote:
| Just having air conditioning in the UK clearly puts you in a
| position with electricity use outside of the normal.
| iSloth wrote:
| Sure - Completely agree with having the air conditioning or
| heat pump running, there would be a higher power consumption
| compared to the average UK property, however this is about
| idle consumption.
|
| When these devices are in "sleep" the unit is doing nothing
| more than looking for an IR signal from the remote controller
| that it's been turned on, just like a TV does etc, so it's
| odd to pull such a large draw in this sleep state.
| colordrops wrote:
| what clamp meter are you using?
| iSloth wrote:
| I'm using an Owl Intuition, however please don't take that as
| a recommendation. I got it cheap on eBay with the network
| bridge included hence why, but the website UI is truly
| terrible.
|
| I'm currently building one myself using the common SCT-013
| sensor, and an ESP32 (arduino) which I plan to then store the
| data in either a little react app, or perhaps Grafana.
| photochemsyn wrote:
| Why doesn't every home have a monitor right off the main panel
| recording current total power draw in a format that is easy to
| read and interpret? Seems like such an obvious way to control
| usage. Running around with a power consumpution monitor for
| every wall socket is all well and good, but might miss a lot of
| silent leaks.
| edent wrote:
| They do. All new smart meters come with an IHD (In Home
| Display). It shows real-time use in kWh or PS.
| grimjack00 wrote:
| > All new smart meters come with an IHD (In Home Display).
|
| Not necessarily. My local utility (Xcel Energy in Colorado,
| US) is in the process of moving to new smart meters, and as
| far as I'm aware, there is no IHD. My apartment complex was
| converted a couple months ago; I can get hourly usage via
| the utility website on about a 3-4 hour delay, but no
| realtime usage.
| edent wrote:
| I'm assuming, if you're in the US, your IHD wouldn't be
| displaying in PS either :-)
|
| Let me be clearer. Every new install of a smart meter _in
| the UK_ is supposed to come with an IHD.
| desas wrote:
| Mine didn't, the meter was installed as part of the house
| build last year.
| julian_sark wrote:
| Careful what you wish for ...
|
| In Germany, this thinking has let to one of two things:
| mandatory smart meters, which may spy on you, and require an
| Internet connection. Beefing up the cost by a factor of, idk,
| a lot.
|
| My local provider (luckily) has opted to install "semi smart"
| meters right before the smart meter became mandatory. Those
| do not need Internet connectivity (and thus, are only
| somewhat more expensive than the old ones). The "semi smart"
| part is, they allow renters to read some power consumption
| figures. How, you ask? do you press a button? Ask again. The
| meter has an encapsulated (notoriously shitty) photo diode.
| You need to flash a code with a flashlight to it! Only then
| will it display the power figures for the last week on the
| LCD display. Madness.
|
| In the same vein, landlords will soon be required to provide
| a monthly overview of heating costs, e.g. by email. Guess who
| pays dearly for this service with no choice? Renters.
|
| Bottom line: Those of us who are already on top of costs get
| expensive, mandatory and ultimately useless services. Those
| who didn't care about running the heater while the window is
| open probably won't care still.
| brnt wrote:
| That is convoluted. Then again, it's Germany. Here in NL
| most places have a meter that beams usage to your utility,
| which send me handy montly reports. By default it's only
| allowed to transmit twice per month, but you can allow it
| to be done daily or near real time (some energy co's
| require it, they'll charge you different hourly rates). The
| privacy around these numbers are guarded: they may only be
| used to calculate your bill.
| robonerd wrote:
| > _The meter has an encapsulated (notoriously shitty) photo
| diode. You need to flash a code with a flashlight to it!
| Only then will it display the power figures for the last
| week on the LCD display. Madness._
|
| That's simultaneously terrible and quite neat.
| outworlder wrote:
| > In Germany, this thinking has let to one of two things:
| mandatory smart meters, which may spy on you, and require
| an Internet connection. Beefing up the cost by a factor of,
| idk, a lot.
|
| My house (in CA - but not PG&E) has a 'smart meter'. Which
| means that they don't have to send people every month on
| every single residence to collect usage data for billing
| anymore. Cost has decreased for them. They do require
| internet connectivity, but it's the power company's
| responsibility (they have spread wifi access points across
| the city for this purpose, that also doubles as free wifi).
|
| What 'spying' are you worried about with your meter? What
| can it report, other than your power usage, that the power
| company would know anyway? Presumably it even is located
| outdoors?
|
| > In the same vein, landlords will soon be required to
| provide a monthly overview of heating costs, e.g. by email.
|
| Well, too bad they have decided on a crappy implementation.
| robonerd wrote:
| > _What 'spying' are you worried about with your meter?
| What can it report, other than your power usage, that the
| power company would know anyway?_
|
| Traditional electro-mechanical meters keep a running sum
| of power used, but can't tell the power company exactly
| how much power you were using at every minute of the day.
| Such a log, although still crude, gives the power company
| much more insight into your daily routine than they ever
| had before.
| danans wrote:
| > Traditional electro-mechanical meters keep a running
| sum of power used, but can't tell the power company
| exactly how much power you were using at every minute of
| the day. Such a log, although still crude, gives the
| power company much more insight into your daily routine
| than they ever had before.
|
| Using traditional summing electro-mechanical meters
| assumes that electricity is priced uniformly at all times
| of day, and encourages over-consumption during times when
| spot market electricity is most expensive, the cost of
| which ends up being shifted to those who consume energy
| at lower spot market price times.
|
| Smart meters allow for time-of-use rates, which are a
| more economically (and in CO2 emissions) efficient way of
| pricing power.
|
| They do expose more information about the times of day
| that individual consumers use electricity to electric
| utilities, though. A consumer who is concerned about and
| also is proponent of market based pricing mechanisms
| could install battery storage to mask their usage
| profile, and even use it to do energy arbitrage.
| rob74 wrote:
| That would work for the total consumption, but if you notice
| that that is too high, you will still have to run around with
| a power consumption monitor to identify the individual
| culprits. Of course, a display saying "you are currently
| using 1300 Watts" would be easier than having to estimate it
| from how fast the wheel on the meter is turning, but
| replacing every meter everywhere is not the most
| environmentally friendly thing to do either...
| masklinn wrote:
| I'd think panel support would logically have a probe per
| circuit, so you could get the complete breakdown if and
| when necessary.
|
| Though obviously it's still only on per-circuit basis, and
| if an idiot wired your house that may be less useful than
| the platonic ideal of house wiring.
| NordSteve wrote:
| Leviton offers what you describe:
|
| https://www.leviton.com/en/products/residential/load-
| centers
| egeek wrote:
| There's an energy monitor with 16 CT clamps included, you
| put one on each of the circuits coming from the fuse board.
| 16 is more than enough for most UK houses, which would at
| least let you know which circuits are consuming the power.
| bzxcvbn wrote:
| > if you notice that that is too high, you will still have
| to run around with a power consumption monitor to identify
| the individual culprits
|
| Or just the good old method of turning things off
| individually, one at a time.
| [deleted]
| notwhereyouare wrote:
| I had a printer that was just spooling up every minute. Was
| doing some stuff and looked at my power consumption and noticed
| it.
|
| Super weird, seems like a job didn't finish or something and it
| was trying to finish printing and just couldn't
| Semaphor wrote:
| Those are some atrocious computer numbers, though. I have a
| desktop PC with 5.1 speakers and 2 Monitors. Standby is less
| than 10W (10W being the lowest my device can recognize). 36W?
| What?
| D13Fd wrote:
| Yeah. The author is way off here.
|
| Another way you can quickly find big offenders is by using an
| infrared camera. I found various things in my house that are
| putting off a ton of heat when doing nothing (and using
| electricity to do it). My 10-year-old speakers with a built-in
| amp, for example, absolutely glow on infrared even when sitting
| there inactive 98% of the time. Now they are on a switch.
| jahewson wrote:
| Your amp isn't "doing nothing" it's just... on. Just because
| you're not feeding it a signal doesn't mean it's not
| amplifying.
| abandonliberty wrote:
| I have electrical heating, so until the summer there's no
| such thing as wasted electricity.
|
| Many people struggle to understand this concept. In some
| climates and energy grids, switching from things like
| incandescent to LED causes a greater environmental impact. It
| may shift (and may have already) as LED production gets more
| efficient.
| ejolto wrote:
| You should read up on heat pumps, they are several times
| more efficient than electrical resistance heaters.
| madaxe_again wrote:
| Depends on what other value you get from your "heater".
| My PC, running at full whack, draws about 700W, which all
| gets radiated as waste heat. It's enough to maintain the
| temperature in my (well-insulated) living room when it's
| 20C colder outside.
| outworlder wrote:
| Still inefficient, but I guess that's power you were
| going to draw anyway.
|
| You sure it's drawing 700W? Are you running multiple GPUs
| or what? Is that a server? Have you measured?
| BizarroLand wrote:
| Also, if your rig goes over, say, 400 watts of power it
| is definitely worth it to get an 80+ efficiency rated
| power supply. There are quite a few tiers, bronze,
| silver, gold, platinum, titanium, etc., but that's the
| equivalent of extra 9's uptime where just the 80+ rating
| is the first 99%
| kemotep wrote:
| I doubt they use a non-80+ power supply with their modern
| high end CPU and GPU seeing as the standard was
| introduced in 2004, with Energy Star certification
| requiring it in 2006.
|
| But not only is the efficiency rating important but the
| specific model's efficiency curves at cold loads and hot
| loads, 20%, 50%, and 100% loads. Paying attention to your
| components and what level of power usage they will be at
| for most of their usage will dictate what the most
| efficient specific model of power supply (at a reasonable
| price point for you). This of course makes reviewing and
| purchasing power supplies quite complicated.
| BizarroLand wrote:
| My personal experience has been that people skimp on the
| power supply, it's the one area where direct performance
| isn't affected so the features that the power supply
| provides are not directly correlated to the overall
| performance of your machine.
|
| Many people, especially in mid-tier or lower builds where
| every dollar for price vs performance has been calculated
| to the decimal point will opt for the cheapest power
| supply that meets the wattage and connector requirements
| their particular build requires, efficiency and longevity
| be damned.
|
| My opinion is that getting a guaranteed 80% power
| conversion efficiency rating (as compared to, say, a 75%
| conversion efficiency rating) on a 500 watt PC will save
| you 25 watts of power over the years that you use it,
| plus a manufacturer that actually goes through the
| process of getting the approval will probably have also
| put a little extra care into their manufacturing process
| and so probably has a better reliability rating than one
| that did not.
|
| Unless you are scraping to get any PC together it may
| well be worth an extra $10 in price variance, all other
| things being equal, for that piece of mind and minor
| electricity savings to boot.
| kemotep wrote:
| My point was, in the past few years I have been buying
| computers, I have never seen a non-80+ psu. Not that they
| do not exist, certainly there are unlabeled white boxes
| for dimes and nickels on the dollar compared to a quality
| one.
|
| I went out of my way to research my current power supply
| to make sure that given my usage and components, it would
| operate in peak efficiency (I believe mine is at nearly
| 95% efficiency at average load, would need to measure it
| more thoroughly, it has been a few years).
|
| I feel a power supply is like tires. They are the only
| thing that actually touches the road(electricity). They
| are worth paying for something halfway decent, not bottom
| of the barrel.
|
| I do agree, but I would be shocked to see a non-80+ psu
| at a reputable store like Micro Center.
| madaxe_again wrote:
| RTX3080 and a 12 core i9-12. Yeah, I'm obsessive about
| power consumption as we're off-grid - it's more like 650W
| at peak, when running a modern game at 4K on maximums.
| Doing nothing much it draws about 50W.
| outworlder wrote:
| Got it. Only reason I asked is that I've seen crazy
| figures thrown around (specially when PSU sizing) that
| never matched reality - specially when you look at the
| claimed cooling solutions. Dissipating 700W is no small
| feat.
| david422 wrote:
| > In some climates and energy grids, switching from things
| like incandescent to LED causes a greater environmental
| impact
|
| How would that be the case?
| nybble41 wrote:
| If you live in a climate where it's too cold for heat
| pumps to function, and rely on electrical (resistive)
| heating instead, the "waste" heat from the incandescent
| bulbs offsets the power needed for heating almost 1:1.
| Replacing those with LED bulbs wouldn't reduce your power
| requirements at all (you'd just run the heaters more) and
| the LEB bulbs require more energy and exotic materials to
| manufacture.
| brnt wrote:
| Is there such a thing as too cold for heat pumps though?
| They drop in efficiency, sure, but still beat resistive
| heating. Modern ones are still going to be 300% efficient
| down to -20C or so. With a resistive pre heater I don't
| see how they'll ever not be more efficient than resistive
| heating.
| BizarroLand wrote:
| My heat pump is a Trane heat pump from 2018 and it goes
| into emergency heat mode when the temps are below 36,
| which is off and on for most of the winter. I wonder if I
| should have it serviced to make sure it's working
| correctly.
| [deleted]
| [deleted]
| bcrosby95 wrote:
| It's partially a function of your heating demands. My
| sister's emergency heat mode would run all the time in
| her town house. But she installed a giant insulating
| curtain over one of her leaky sliders and now it almost
| never needs to run.
| nybble41 wrote:
| A heat pump with a sufficiently powerful resistive
| preheater will be at least as energy-efficient in
| operation as the resistive heater alone, but it's also
| much more complex, with a correspondingly higher up-front
| cost and ongoing maintenance requirements. A resistive
| heater can consist of little more than a solid-state
| heating element, a blower fan, and a mechanical
| thermostat; radiative heaters can even dispense with the
| fan, which is the least reliable part of the system. A
| heat pump, by contrast, additionally involves pumps, heat
| exchangers, and volatile fluids under pressure, generally
| under the management of some moderately complex logic.
| fencepost wrote:
| _If you live in a climate where it 's too cold for heat
| pumps to function, and rely on electrical (resistive)
| heating instead_
|
| That's the point where I'd strongly consider
| cryptocurrency mining.
| outworlder wrote:
| > If you live in a climate where it's too cold for heat
| pumps to function
|
| Year round? So you mean the polar regions? Because they
| can work even at -10F. Efficiency is reduced, but they
| can work. Crappy ones will cutoff earlier though. If you
| are not in one of the planet's poles, we have seasons so
| it's better to use LEDs for at least 3/4 of the time
| (maybe more as even northern latitudes only have a few
| really severe winter days).
|
| Modern LED lamps are tiny and use very little material.
| Incandescent bulbs are no longer considered 'exotic'
| because of how old the tech is, but tungsten was a very
| exotic material at some point.
| jhugo wrote:
| 5x 100W light bulbs is 0.5kW of heat output which your
| heating system doesn't need to supply.
|
| Switch to LED and your heating system will need to supply
| that extra 0.5kW.
|
| In a climate where you are almost always running heating,
| this makes the benefit of switching to LED much smaller,
| and considering that they are much less environmentally
| friendly to produce, it may even tip the scale the other
| way.
| D13Fd wrote:
| This really only applies where the heat is frequently so
| low that heat pumps cannot function. Antarctica, or maybe
| Siberia or northern Alaska.
|
| Beyond that, heat pumps are still much more efficient
| than direct electric heating.
|
| Also, if you have air conditioning at any point in the
| year, those incandescent lights are just going to make
| your air conditioner work that much harder.
| post-it wrote:
| Resistive electrical heating is typically the most
| expensive heating option available, at least here in
| Canada. A heat pump uses much less power to provide the
| same amount of heat, and fossil fuel heating (gas in the
| west, oil in the east) is often much less expensive than
| electric.
| gregable wrote:
| Yes, but. There are few places that need heating 100% of
| the year and fewer people living there. During the non-
| heating hours/days, that's just waste heat.
|
| Depending on where the bulbs are located, they may be
| emitting into a ceiling cavity that exits the building's
| envelope more quickly than the location of the heating
| coil. Some bulbs are actually outside the building.
|
| And of course, the heating system can supply 0.5kW for
| less than 0.5kW of power with heat pumps or (net
| including generation and transmission) natural gas.
| aperson_hello wrote:
| It used to be the case. The energy cost of production was
| massively higher in their early days and if the waste
| heat was used, there wasn't a net energy savings. Not so
| much anymore, especially when increased lifespan is taken
| into account (it's at least at parity at this point).
| gigel82 wrote:
| Reminds me of the story of the LED traffic lights that
| freeze in winter, thus needing an additional heating
| solution (making them more expensive / error-prone and
| even less energy-efficient during cold weather): https://
| www.popularmechanics.com/technology/infrastructure/a...
| gregable wrote:
| That was once true but it's no longer a real issue:
| https://youtu.be/GiYO1TObNz8
| danans wrote:
| > In some climates and energy grids, switching from things
| like incandescent to LED causes a greater environmental
| impact.
|
| But for a huge number of people (probably the majority) who
| live in more temperate climates (most of Europe and the
| US), they are a net win both in their energy bills and
| environmentally marginal extremely cold climates. That's
| the people whom LEDs target, not the people in marginal
| extreme cold climates running high power-draw servers in
| their homes.
| outworlder wrote:
| I've thought about buying an infrared camera, but I've found
| them to be terribly expensive. Not in scientific terms as
| they are precision instruments, but in 'I have some money to
| spend on amazon but this thing has high three figures so I'll
| buy something else'. Specifically talking about FLIR and the
| direct competitor I forgot the name.
|
| Are there any affordable cameras that are not completely
| trash? Low resolution is ok.
| D13Fd wrote:
| Mine is an HTI-19 320 x 240 resolution one that was $233 on
| Amazon. It's not cheap, but I've certainly saved more than
| that in electricity from problems it identified in the 2.5
| years since I bought it. It works just fine.
|
| An infrared camera is great for tracking down and fixing
| insulation problems in your house, if you own a home. And
| fixing insulation issues really brings down your
| heating/cooling bills.
|
| If you don't own a home the value proposition is a lot
| worse, but $200 or so still isn't bad for something that
| amounts to a fun toy.
|
| EDIT: Sorry, it was $380 before Amazon points. I should
| have clicked into the invoice.
| corobo wrote:
| Hypothetically speaking you could buy one, find the hot
| spots, send it back to Amazon.
|
| Morally it's not exactly solid but at least you're not
| standing on the backs of the poor to be a billionaire and
| all that
| gehwartzen wrote:
| The FLIR One or Pro are in the $220-300 range if I remember
| correctly. They attach to your iphone and use that as the
| screen an maybe for some processing. In any case it works
| pretty well for most personal applications you might run
| across.
| edent wrote:
| Really depends where in the world you are. In the UK / EU
| there are rather strict rules on how much power devices can
| use in standby.
| m_eiman wrote:
| While an IR camera is a good tool (and terribly fun to use!),
| not everyone has one. Almost everyone has another tool that
| can be nearly as efficient though: a hand.
|
| It's quite easy to use too: if something is warm when you
| touch it, it's burning through watts. If you expected it to
| be sleeping, it's either not sleeping or it's very bad at it.
| Don't forget the AC adapters, they can be worse than the
| devices they supply.
| sidewndr46 wrote:
| In a net heating environment, this is less of an issue than
| otherwise immediately obvious. A small idle electronic
| device making a consistent amount of heat just helps heat
| the house. If electricity is very expensive it would make
| sense to try and track down the offenders however.
| londons_explore wrote:
| In most of the world electrical heat is about 3x as
| expensive as the next cheapest heating (gas, coal, oil,
| heat pump or wood)
| m_eiman wrote:
| Hopefully you have another heating system that's more
| efficient than direct electricity, though!
| _Algernon_ wrote:
| How can heating be inefficient?
| robonerd wrote:
| Besides the matter of heat pumps which others have
| covered, there is also the matter of how good your
| heating system is at getting heat to where you actually
| need it.
|
| A PC under your desk will keep your toes warm, and maybe
| with warm toes you don't really mind the rest of the
| house being at 10 C / 50 F. With such space heater, you
| can turn down the thermostat for the entire house and
| only heat the parts you care about most. Furthermore
| there are radiative space heaters which direct infrared
| energy to a specific part of the room using a reflective
| dish, instead of heating the entire room using
| convection. In large rooms, radiative space heater can
| keep you feeling warm while using much less energy than a
| heatpump would require to heat the whole room.
| mort96 wrote:
| By generating only 1 joule of heat per 1 joule of
| electricity used. There are lots of much more efficient
| ways to heat homes.
| denton-scratch wrote:
| How can any electric heating system be more "efficient"
| than an inefficient appliance? Inefficiency in an
| electrical appliance is nothing more than a measure of
| how good that appliance is at turning electricity into
| heat.
| KiranRao0 wrote:
| A heat pump. Instead of using power to heat a room,
| you're using a (relatively) small amount of power to move
| heat from outside into the room.
| [deleted]
| jseutter wrote:
| I had this same thought at one point and eventually
| learned of heat pumps. Heat pumps move heat from one spot
| to another, ie from outside your house to inside your
| house, or the other way. The point is, they move more
| energy than they consume. So that 1kwh of energy turned
| into heat by an inefficient electrical appliance could
| have instead been used to move 5kwh worth of heat into
| your home by a heat pump.
|
| Heat pumps are more efficient than they used to be (at
| some point the outside air is too cold for them to work
| efficiently), so the cold climate where I'm from is just
| now starting to see them included in new homes.
| denton-scratch wrote:
| Yes, I've considered getting a heat pump; for one reason
| and another, I can't.
|
| It doesn't feel right to talk about the "efficiency" of a
| heat pump system; talk of "1W in gets you 3W out" isn't
| right, because you didn't magic those 3W out of thin air.
| It's more like "4W in gets you 4W out". It seems wrong to
| say that a heat pump system is "400% efficient".
|
| I thought efficiency was a measure of how much of the
| work[0] going into a machine is transformed into the
| intended output work. I suppose you could say that this
| heat delivery machine is inefficient if a lot of the
| input work is expended on producing torque, or raising
| heavy stuff. But even that eventually turns into heat;
| just in the wrong place.
|
| [0] I hope I'm using "work" and "machine" in the
| technical sense, so that "work" means displacement
| against a force, and a "machine" is any device for
| converting work from one form to another. Effiency is
| well-defined for that kind of machine: it's just the
| ratio of work in to work out, the output being what you
| want; so "efficiency" intrinsically depends on what your
| intentions are for your machine. .
| zarzavat wrote:
| All heaters are 100% efficient in a closed system.
| However, your house is not a closed system. It's a
| spatial region of an open system. In this context it
| makes sense to talk about efficiency as being lower or
| greater than 100%.
| Sohcahtoa82 wrote:
| > It doesn't feel right to talk about the "efficiency" of
| a heat pump system; talk of "1W in gets you 3W out" isn't
| right, because you didn't magic those 3W out of thin air.
| It's more like "4W in gets you 4W out". It seems wrong to
| say that a heat pump system is "400% efficient".
|
| Those 3W didn't come out of thin air, it came from
| outside air.
|
| 1W of energy going into the heat pump causes 4W of heat
| energy to get moved from outside your house to the inside
| of your house.
|
| That's the key thing to take note of. Traditional
| resistive heating works by turning electrical energy into
| heat energy directly. Heat pumps move heat energy the
| same way an A/C unit does, it just moves it the other
| way.
|
| Essentially, a heat pump is just an A/C unit with the
| evaporator and the condenser flipped.
| Freestyler_3 wrote:
| The efficiency is higher than input because the
| electricity is only used to transfer heat from one spot
| to another. This is when the gas gets compressed, to get
| to the condensing stage at the high pressure. (+after
| burn for optimal efficiency)
| shagie wrote:
| Another one of my "came across this in YouTube" things
| (started with the design of a hurricane lantern) Why Heat
| Pumps are Immensely Important Right Now -
| https://youtu.be/MFEHFsO-XSI
|
| The key is the Coefficient of performance
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coefficient_of_performance
| mort96 wrote:
| In addition to what other people are saying, there's also
| district heating:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/District_heating Heat can
| be generated efficiently in some centralized location
| (from geothermal heat, power plant waste heat, solar, or
| whatever) and then distributed to nearby homes.
|
| There's lots of ways to heat homes in ways which use way
| less than 1 joule of electricity for 1 joule of heat.
| sp332 wrote:
| If your electricity comes from natural gas, it would be
| more efficient to burn the gas on-site for heat than to
| burn it to generate electricity, distribute the
| electricity, and then turn it back to heat.
| shagie wrote:
| Yes...ish.
|
| However, consider the greater performance scales with
| generators combined with the amount of useful heat that
| one gets out of a heat pump can be better than converting
| the natural gas to heat locally - even with losses on the
| grid.
|
| The key is that a heat pump doesn't convert electricity
| to heat (as a resistive heater) but rather moves heat
| from one spot (outside) to inside with great efficiency.
| sp332 wrote:
| Yes, but the comment I'm replying to is about resistive
| heating from inefficient appliances.
| totoglazer wrote:
| Most efficient to burn the gas for electricity and use
| that to power a heat pump.
| [deleted]
| electroly wrote:
| The others mentioned heat pumps but I'll mention that the
| person you replied to never said "electric" and is likely
| referring to gas heating.
| markus92 wrote:
| A heat pump?
| sidewndr46 wrote:
| If you had a heat pump, it would be more effective to run
| that for sure.
| PaulHoule wrote:
| In the summer though heating the house is a bad thing.
| Either you are making your house hotter or you're making
| the air conditioner work harder to remove it.
| esaym wrote:
| Even better, just go to a pawn shop or ebay and get a used
| current clamp meter for cheap. Then pull the cover off of
| your circuit breaker box in your house and check the
| current draw on each and every wire.
| chrisBob wrote:
| My local library has them available to check out for free!
| The payback period for buying a Flir camera to do your own
| energy audit is likely long, but checking one out is pretty
| reasonable.
| giantrobot wrote:
| > Almost everyone has another tool that can be nearly as
| efficient though: a hand.
|
| I've found the IR camera works much better than my hand for
| things like switching power supplies. They'll be glowing in
| IR while being cool to the touch even when no device is
| plugged into them. While each might not be a ton of power I
| tended to just leave them plugged in all the time.
| quietbritishjim wrote:
| Speakers are notoriously a specific case where power actually
| does get used in standby, so it doesn't really contradict the
| original article. For instance, an old BBC News article (not
| the one published today that probably triggered this
| submission) listed "TV on standby" as using lots of power but
| was actually including various peripherals including powered
| on external speakers. I would expect turning those off and
| leaving the TV on would use almost no power. If, as parent
| comment says, even the TV/monitor is using significant power,
| then that's a lot more interesting.
| dspillett wrote:
| _> I would expect turning those off and leaving the TV on
| would use almost no power_
|
| That is going to vary a lot depending on the TV. I suspect
| a lot of modern "smart" TVs consume a measurable amount
| when idle.
| maccard wrote:
| Idle or in standby? EU regulations state the maximum
| standby power is 0.5w.
| madaxe_again wrote:
| You do, however, typically need to set "low power
| standby" or whatever in the options somewhere - it's
| usually not enabled by default - the default is usually
| to turn the screen off but leave everything else running.
| Mine drew about 5W in "normal" standby, and is
| immeasurably low (from our household inverters - I live
| off grid) in low power standby. It takes about 10 seconds
| to boot - no big deal.
| scarby2 wrote:
| > You do, however, typically need to set "low power
| standby" or whatever in the options somewhere - it's
| usually not enabled by default
|
| i had the opposite, i had to disable the low power
| standby (which was on by default) so i could wake it over
| the ethernet or via HDMI-CEC
| nsteel wrote:
| I believe the low power mode is required (by UK law, at
| least) to be enabled by default. It's pointless otherwise
| as almost nobody will go and enable that mode.
| D13Fd wrote:
| It may be a specific case, but then the article title
| should be "No, you can't save PS30 per year, unless you
| happen to have speakers like most people..."
|
| But there are other things around as well. My old laserjet
| printer was another offender.
| m55au wrote:
| You have measured the apparent power (volt-amperes), not the
| active power (watts) that you pay for. There can be quite a big
| difference, especially at standby.
| disiplus wrote:
| how did you get 500w of idle use. that does not make sense.
| could you please post your table. i have my pc all the time on
| and some other things and not even close to that.
| mrjin wrote:
| I'm wondering too. I actually tested almost all devices at
| home and the idle power consumption actually quite different
| from my previous perception. The following are a few I
| tested: 1. Microwave Oven. ~3W. 2. DECT phone base. ~2W.
| Extension unit. ~1W. 3. IP phone. ~1W. 4. Cable Modem. ~10W.
| 5. Routers. ~3W to 20W. 6. Switches. ~1W to 30W. 7.
| NAS(4Bay). ~40W. 8. Raspberry Pi 3B. ~3W. 9. Chargers/Power
| adapters. ~0W to3W. 10. WIFI Smart Plugs. ~1W when switch
| off. ~1.5W when turned out, both no load at all. 11. Set top
| box. ~15W, on or off. 12. PCs/Laptops. ~3W off, ~5W to 15W
| on.
|
| To me the DECT phone, Set top box, cable modem consumes much
| more than I thought. Routers/Switches are more or less align
| with what I thought. What surprised me was that
| chargers/power adapters from decent brands were doing much
| better than I expected. Most chargers/power adapters I have
| consumes ~0.1W when idle, some event shown as 0w. Except one
| dodgy one came with a cheap toy PC behaves pretty weirdly:
| peaks at around 10w when just plugged in then gradually
| reduced to ~1.5w. Might be because it is a traditional power
| supplier with a transformer in it.
|
| So the standby power consumption of my household should be
| just below 100W and I don't see how I can get it close to
| 500W.
| [deleted]
| iSloth wrote:
| Sure, it'll be a while before I had something cleaned up
| nicely, however I've added some screenshots to my original
| post.
| xyzzy123 wrote:
| Agree, 500w of nothing is INSANE in 2022 are you sure. Please
| list brands.
| mikepurvis wrote:
| I don't think it's any one thing that's 500W, it's an
| accumulation of many devices all doing 20-100W. Lots of
| modern PCs are 30W+ even when off-- like not even on sleep,
| but on off/standby.
|
| So these numbers don't surprise me in the slightest.
| [deleted]
| disiplus wrote:
| i worked for a electricity meter maker and measured
| consumption for things in my house and have now meters on
| most sockets and so on. 500w idle is huge.
| roter wrote:
| How much is the draw of all those ammeters? i.e. the
| "burden". I'm having trouble finding what that would be
| for a typical household plug ammeter without avoiding all
| the "power meters are great" spam sites. I assume it is
| very small.
| disiplus wrote:
| i had access to industrial power meters designed to 120A
| 400V so that is what i used, but the typical household
| here would not go over 4-7 kw and you can buy cheap
| digital meters from AliExpress with display and so on
| they can measure up to 4kw i believe.
| vetinari wrote:
| I'm using Shelly EM at the entry (for the entire phase),
| relays with PM at some sockets with _interesting_ devices
| and shelly plugs at some sockets that need to be easily
| serviceable (think behind kitchen cabinets, for the
| built-ins).
|
| The consumption of each of them is below 1W.
| xyzzy123 wrote:
| Nobody is missing 50w any more because that goes on their
| BOM as a bigger power brick. I can see this stuff where
| someone missed an incandescent or hasn't replaced a
| device in 10 years but really stuff has moved on and cost
| optimisation is relentless.
| egeek wrote:
| Yes it's huge, but not out of the question for some
| people who go all in on some things in their house.
|
| For example, in my place right now: -
| Unifi rack (some switches, cameras, other PoE stuff) -
| 335W - Servers (home automation, NAS, etc) - 426W
|
| That's all the time, Unifi actually goes up at night when
| the IR LEDs come on in the cameras.
| xyzzy123 wrote:
| That's not "idle" use... somebody wasted good money on
| those labour-saving devices. And they'll write a blog
| post about it too once they get around to fixing them!
|
| (I write this lovingly yet seriously as absolutely a
| victim of this exact same dynamic, sitting next to a pile
| of expensive fans I'm going to use to reduce the noise
| from my rack... any day now...).
| mmcnl wrote:
| That's still insane. I have a Hue bridge and server at
| home that together draw less than 50W. Network equipment
| is also in the range of max 10W per device.
| burmanm wrote:
| Which modern PC draws 30W when off? When mine is off, the
| electricity calculator states 0W (the draw is less than
| it can register).
|
| Even for sleep mode that would be huge. 30W is about the
| normal modern PC idle (on, but not doing anything)
| consumption, not any sleep / standby / off state
| consumption.
| mikepurvis wrote:
| The specific case I'm thinking of was an Advantech
| AIMB-274 with a Mini-Box PSU (I don't remember which
| one). I was evaluating this setup for inclusion in a
| battery powered mobile robot; in particular we needed to
| decide whether the computer could be hooked up to the
| battery full time or if there needed to be a relay in
| between them in order to preserve the battery when the
| robot was "off". The answer turned out to be that we very
| much needed to disconnect the computer.
|
| Admittedly this is not a consumer PC or a "modern"
| gold/bronze-designated power supply, but I still thought
| it was pretty significant.
| lobocinza wrote:
| Mine is <100W now. Including a big monitor.
| saiya-jin wrote:
| 30W with high end CPU and graphic card in desktop and
| tons of plugged pheripals and big screen? They have good
| power management these days but not _that_ good.
|
| Plus many people use electronics build 5-10 years ago
| which are generally bigger offenders.
| outworlder wrote:
| It doesn't matter if it is a computer with multiple GPUs
| for cryptomining. If it's 'off', PCI should be off, etc.
| Hello71 wrote:
| My ASRock B450 Pro4 draws about 3W from the wall if WOL
| is enabled, which in ASRock's firmware seems to keep all
| PCI devices (and attached USB devices) powered. 30W seems
| impossible though, anything not specifically designed to
| be fanless will almost certainly need to turn on the fan
| at that power usage (and even fanless might have
| difficulty dissipating a constant 30W).
| marcosdumay wrote:
| Monitors can dissipate a huge amount of power without a
| fan. The OP blames mostly them, and their stand-by power
| consumption usually isn't even available to a buyer.
| mikepurvis wrote:
| Surely the display panel itself is switched off when on
| standby, though? Is this a case of not including a
| separate standby power supply circuit, so that it's the
| "main" one inside there running at a fraction of its
| capacity, where it is least efficient?
| gruez wrote:
| >I noticed through my energy monitor that idle power
| consumption was about 0.4-0.5kW while everyone was sleeping at
| night, which seemed high to my research of national averages.
|
| >Edit, here's a very quick screenshot of the spreadsheet and
| data I've got to hand at the moment, in time I'll get something
| better cleaned up and together.
|
| Many of the items on the list stretch the definition of "idle".
| For instance, network equipment. Sure, I guess if you're not
| using the internet at a given time it's "idle" and therefore
| can be turned off, but your use of it is so random that you
| effectively can't turn it off. Same goes for "clock and alexa".
| The networking equipment category alone makes up 78W, or 20% of
| the total. Also, listing fridge as "idle"? You effectively need
| it on 24/7.
| iSloth wrote:
| Sure, I guess my definition of idle is everyone in the house
| asleep not using any appliances and having them all in the
| generally accepted idle state.
|
| Network Equipment I actually swapped a decent amount of it -
| The testing showed the Netgear managed switches were using
| around 1W each, opposed to 20w for the DLink switch, and
| another 20w for a Unifi Switch.
|
| The Hob/Microwave I manually just power off now as I don't
| need them on all day long, and devices which I put Alexa
| controller relays on were the aircon units, my PC & Monitors
| and the TV & Surround (other than Sky Box)
| bcrosby95 wrote:
| Definitions are being stretched all around for this.
|
| Vampire/phantom power was a specific problem where devices
| that were turned off by the user would still consume 5-10w.
| The only way to remove that power use was to completely cut
| the electricity to the device. From testing I did a while
| ago, devices made after around 2010 don't have this
| problem.
|
| Deciding not to turn off a device can certainly be a
| problem. But it's a relatively new one.
| onionisafruit wrote:
| > Also, listing fridge as "idle"?
|
| The refrigerator isn't constantly cooling. You could consider
| the time when it is cycled off to be idle. Of course it is
| constantly monitoring for when it needs to start cooling
| again. If it's well insulated and your home is a reasonable
| temperature you can probably turn it off at night when you
| know you won't be opening it. I don't have any expertise. I'm
| just speculating.
| mastax wrote:
| I'm pretty sure refrigerators have electric heaters in the
| door gaskets as well.
| verall wrote:
| > you can probably turn it off at night when you know you
| won't be opening it
|
| The compressor is going to run in the morning though to
| make up the lost cold unless you want your ice to melt.
| Seems the marginal benefit would be tiny. It probably
| messes up the cool/defrost cycle that modern fridges go
| through too.
| kraig911 wrote:
| I use air purifiers in home and I am trying to do the same.
| Issue is a lot of the electronics like these honeywell
| purifiers require user input when turned on or off. Do you know
| of any tricks around this?
| Marsymars wrote:
| No good solution I've found other than being careful in
| product purchases.
|
| I recently got some Blueair air purifiers and was careful to
| check the manual for power off functionality first. ("The
| autostart feature automatically restarts the air purifier at
| the last set speed if it has been unplugged, used with a
| power switch timer, or if a power failure occurs.")
| outworlder wrote:
| Other than modifying the device to provide the missing input?
| No.
|
| You could also use some ridiculous solution like the
| switchbot.
| noTooMooch wrote:
| Damn; and I felt gaudy with my phone, personal desktop, single
| smart speaker and laptop through work being my only gadgets at
| home.
|
| How much money would be saved if we didn't fetishize owning a
| bunch of stuff that idly costs more money? How much
| electricity, since that matters in real terms to me more than
| your finances.
| nicgrev103 wrote:
| Please do post your full experience, I'd be interested. I saw
| an article this morning and it spurred me to buy some smart
| plugs to cut power overnight to standby devices
| (https://www.telegraph.co.uk/bills-and-utilities/gas-
| electric...)
| nicgrev103 wrote:
| Come to think of it, the smart plugs probably draw similar
| power to the appliances on standby..??
| bbarnett wrote:
| It's OK, there are smart plugs you can use, to cut the
| power to them.
| zekica wrote:
| Smart plugs all the way down.
| outworlder wrote:
| Most are similar to well-behaved appliances - so low it's
| difficult to measure. Even more so if they are not wifi.
|
| I have one in my desk that's then plugged to a power strip
| so it can cut power to multiple devices at once. It can
| even measure power consumption - sitting at around 80W as I
| type this, with a laptop, 34" monitor, Echo, wireless
| charger, USB switcher, USB hub, a desktop computer
| currently 'off', standing desk, laptop dock and the list
| goes on.
| aclelland wrote:
| Yeah I'm confused by this article. I've got a Virgin Media TV
| box which used 25w while on standby. Maybe I'm doing the math
| wrong but:
|
| 25w * 24 * 365 = 219000w or 219kw per year.
|
| At my current electricity rate that's PS39.42 per year at a
| very minimum just for the TV box.
| ars wrote:
| A good approximation is that 1W of power for a year costs you
| one Dollar (or Euro) per year.
| MauranKilom wrote:
| The math is right but the units are messy. Watts are already
| energy/time, which is correct for the 25 W figure, but the
| 219 should be kWh/year.
|
| 25 W * 24 h/day * 365 days/year = 219000 Wh/year = 219
| kWh/year
|
| Which makes me notice that 1 kWh / year = 1000 Wh / year =
| 1000 Wh / (356 * 24h) = 0.117 W. So you can quickly estimate
| that a device with x Watts of constant consumption will have
| you paying for roughly 10 x kWh in electricity a year. With
| electricity costs on the order of 20 cents/kWh, that means a
| rule of thumb is "double the wattage, that's how many $ it'll
| cost you to have it running all year".
| egeek wrote:
| Your math is right, if you're not recording at night then you
| can switch it off at night (we switch one of ours off at
| night on a timer)
| 8fingerlouie wrote:
| Sonos devices are also quite power hungry in standby, in the
| 4-6W range (230v)
|
| https://support.sonos.com/s/article/256?language=en_US
| moralestapia wrote:
| 500W of "idle" power consumption is waaaay too high, in my
| experience. That's my average rate when I have everything on.
|
| Granted, I live in a place where AC is not needed and use
| laptops instead of PCs to work on. ~$40/month is my total
| electriciy bill (I'm on the lowest end, I know).
| hanoz wrote:
| Definitely. Electricity at the current UK price cap is pretty
| much bang on PS2.50 per watt-year, so there are some eye
| watering annual standby costs in that spreadsheet.
| Loic wrote:
| We are a family of 5 in Germany, we have a 70EUR/month
| electricity bill. 2500kWh per year with one person (me) in
| home office. 3000kWh with two persons and the kids being more
| at home.
| bitexploder wrote:
| My house uses about 1500-1800kWh per month. We just bought
| it though and are working to get it efficient.
| mmcnl wrote:
| How is that possible? Electrical heating / AC?
| bitexploder wrote:
| Unclear. We just got solar panels and are auditing all
| the energy users now. There were some resistive heaters
| running we didn't know about that pushed an extra 500kWh
| before. I think we got it down to about 1600 kWh. I think
| with all the he mods we are doing we can get it down
| below 1000 kWh but it will take time and more efficiency
| improving.
| mmcnl wrote:
| I would suggest to get a smart electricity meter so you
| can see "live" power usage. I'm not familiar with
| resistive heaters, but it appears they are purely
| electrical, which means they are only 100% efficient.
| Heat pumps (you can use AC for heating) are >300%
| efficient.
|
| For reference: my 2 person household uses less than 3000
| kWh / year (gas heating and electrical cooking), so even
| 1000 kWh / month would be a lot imo.
| bitexploder wrote:
| The solar system provides a whole house real time meter
| so we should be able to track down usage easier. We'll
| see. We have two teenagers and a larger house and
| workshop, so, quite a few variables to figure out. We are
| converting the whole house to heat pumps. These units are
| state of the art and hit 370% efficiency.
| sixstringtheory wrote:
| I'm in the same boat. Electric baseboard heaters are
| what're killing us.
|
| To the 500W figure mentioned above, I plugged our little
| space heater into a kill-a-watt meter and it measured it
| at 500W/day.
|
| Resistive electric heating is brutally expensive. I'm
| looking into heat pumps before next winter.
| bitexploder wrote:
| We have a boiler and some resistive heating. We are going
| with whole house (6500 sqft total) heat pump system. Ends
| up being several large commercial Fujitsu units that are
| efficient down to -20F (Colorado weather). We expect to
| dramatically cut our energy consumption with this move
| and be totally off natural gas. Combined with the solar
| and battery system we are getting we should be completely
| energy independent and net producing electricity which is
| cool :)
| mwint wrote:
| 500W/day is a nonsensical unit; I assume you either mean
| 500W or 500Wh/day (different by a factor of 24)
| zekica wrote:
| I agree, 500W is when my 2 TVs, 2 desktop PCs, 2 32 inch
| monitors, NAS, router, 3 wifi APs and 3/10 lights are on and
| my fridge, freezer and other miscellaneous non-smart devices
| are plugged in.
|
| Idle power with NAS, router and wifi APs are on, and TVs,
| PCs, Monitors are in standby is about 150W. It can be lower,
| but it is convenient and with $0.10/kWh it is just $10 a
| month.
| [deleted]
| GekkePrutser wrote:
| My 'base' load in the house is about 100W.. Containing 3 servers
| (one 10W-idle Skylake i5 NUC, the other 5W-idle Atom-based, one
| Raspberry Pi 4), one router, one fibre modem, one 4G backup
| modem, security system, 5 network switches around the house, 2
| Access Points.. Oh and one light (NUC) desktop I run 24/7 but in
| low-power at night (with most processes suspended). It
| accumulates to about 100W. All in all that adds up to a lot more
| than 30 bucks/year, it's about 1 euro per day at current prices.
| But I need all this stuff.
|
| Everything that drains considerable power is already on a
| switchbox. It's just the way it is, a smart house saves a lot of
| power but it costs some too.
|
| Still, we've come a long way. 100W used to be one lightbulb. Now
| I can run my whole house on that.
| aulin wrote:
| seems underestimated, did you measure it? no fridge? no tv?
| GekkePrutser wrote:
| I didn't count the fridge, no. I took the base load from the
| times the fridge compressor is off.
|
| The TV in standby is included though. And yeah it's measured.
| I have a Shelly EM2 connected to home assistant.
| aulin wrote:
| Ok, asking because I'm getting around 150W measured base
| load with way less computing devices but two fridges. I
| need to start monitoring single appliances to see who's
| guilty.
| GekkePrutser wrote:
| Yeah if you have two it's a lot harder to see. I don't
| have sensors on a lot of individual devices, definitely
| not the fridge.
|
| But on my house power graph it's really clear when the
| fridge is on because I see a huge spike when the
| compressor starts up and then about 50W constant load
| while it cools. Also, I have temperature sensors in both
| the fridge and freezer compartments so I can see exactly
| when it's cooling (which coincides with that power draw).
|
| But almost all my computing devices are low-power ones
| and that really helps a lot. Some are in the living room
| so noise was also a consideration. The only big exception
| is my game PC - I always shut that down fully and only
| really use it for gaming because even idle it will take
| 200W or so. I have an RTX3080Ti in it so it's not power-
| efficient :)
| Helmut10001 wrote:
| I have a Shelly Plug S connected to my PC Speakers, which
| connects to my InfluxDB 2.0 via MQTT. The speakers use 11 Watt on
| average, even if turned off, which amounts to 96.10 kWh per year.
| In Germany, that would be 37.48 EUR (39 cent/kWh), or 31.51PS -
| only one device turned off.
|
| Now, I still leave it on, because turning a power adapter on and
| off 365 times a year may also render it useless after a while. I
| was actually thining about this recently, and whether I should
| use the Shelly to turn it off automatically, but did not reach a
| conclusion so far.
| midislack wrote:
| I switch them off to prevent large corporations from spying on
| me.
| cobbaut wrote:
| And what is the cost of unplugging devices after every use?
|
| Not just replacing sockets or cables, but is not true that
| (electronic) devices have a longer live if they are always
| plugged in?
|
| Are electronic components happy now with the constant power
| on/off cycles?
| sidewndr46 wrote:
| Unless you're using something with tubes in it, there is
| basically no penalty to unplugging. I use a power strip with a
| switch so I have the option to turn off everything when I want
| to.
| qayxc wrote:
| > And what is the cost of unplugging devices after every use?
|
| You really think your time is worth so much that taking 10
| seconds extra for plugging/unplugging a device is worth even
| considering?
|
| > Not just replacing sockets or cables
|
| Never happened to me once in over 3 decades. Both sockets and
| cables usually have a longer lifespan than any of your
| appliances.
|
| > Are electronic components happy now with the constant power
| on/off cycles?
|
| Depends entirely on the design of the device and the components
| used.
|
| The notion stems from the olden days of analogue devices, which
| indeed often didn't like being power cycled. Turning appliances
| on and off twice a day, though, doesn't affect the lifespan in
| the slightest.
| jansan wrote:
| If you use 5 devices a day and need 30 seconds for plugging and
| unplugging, this will accumulate to 75 hours per year. If you
| make 15EUR per hour, the cost of opportunity would be 1140EUR.
| Ouch!
| CyanDeparture wrote:
| When I was staying at my parents over the winter holidays, after
| they'd gone to be at 9pm, my wifi went down and I had to
| troubleshoot what on earth was up with my laptop. Turns out my
| dad turns off the router every night to save energy, it was
| pretty low on my list of things that might be wrong with the
| wifi.
| t0mas88 wrote:
| The author acts as if it's all bullshit, but actual measurements
| in my house disagree. I have a new (2021) 4k "sky box" from my
| ISP, a relatively new Android TV (2020), a PS4, a Logitech
| Harmony hub and a lan switch plugged into one socket. The
| measurement device shows a total of 35W continuous power usage
| when they're all in standby.
|
| Programmed a rule in my home automation to turn off that whole
| socket if it's after 11pm and the lights are off, then back on in
| the morning. It's around 100 kwh per year, which is more than 30
| euros at current energy prices over here.
| lmt55 wrote:
| Does standby for the sky box, the lan switch and the hub just
| mean normal operation?
| djhworld wrote:
| Have you broken them out individually?
|
| I'd imagine your router is probably the primary contributor to
| that 35W.
| tomerv wrote:
| It's a good thing if you already have home automation set up.
| But installing home automation probably costs more than the 30
| euros/year you're saving on electricity.
| pjc50 wrote:
| Hmm. I think I need to do some measurement on my TV setup.
| JshWright wrote:
| I use a ZWave light switch in our bedroom that can trigger
| "scene" commands on a double/triple tap. A double tap at night
| fires a scene that tells Home Assistant to shut all the things
| off (and make sure the doors are locked, garage door is closed,
| HVAC is set correctly, etc). Double tap up in the morning turns
| stuff back on.
| efitz wrote:
| I don't know if it was the same in the UK, but growing up in the
| 70s and 80s here in the US it always felt like the future was
| going to be plentiful - think "The Jetsons". I always figured
| that electricity would be cheap and ubiquitous. Weird that didn't
| turn out.
| automatic6131 wrote:
| >Weird that didn't turn out. Decades of a green energy policy
| being developed by what are, apparently, human-shaped ostriches
| have led us to being partially dependent on an autocratic
| regime. Other things such as pipeline (US) and fracking (UK)
| projects being shutdown by a bizzaro left-green lobby mean a
| real difficulty in substituting the energy input that our
| entire economy runs on.
|
| Bizzaro because the left desperately wants to redistribute the
| very thing it's attempting to shut down, as they probably
| haven't considered that energy underpins all the wealth we
| have. And the greenies - who are nearly universally left wing
| also - probably will shout loudly when people are shivering in
| their homes and not getting enough to eat. And never blame
| themselves.
|
| But the real blame for this lies at the feet of politicans,
| blue and red, who have allowed these loud eejits to dictate
| energy policy: shutting down nuclear plants, subsidising
| intermittent energy without (the necessary and) even more
| significant investments in energy storage. Using green
| credentailism as a vote winner and nothing more.
| mort96 wrote:
| Uh, this seems incoherent. You're calling the group that's
| calling for avoiding the worst consequences of climate change
| "ostriches". Aren't the ostriches the people who advocate
| keeping current emissions trajectories while ignoring the
| consequences that'll have on the lives of billions of people?
| automatic6131 wrote:
| The _politicians_ are the ostriches. The group calling for
| "avoiding the worst consequences of climate change" are,
| through ignorance, calling for war and mass starvation.
| mort96 wrote:
| The politicians who want to avoid the worst consequence
| of climate change are ostriches, and the politicians who
| advocate in favor of worsening climate change are the
| non-ostriches?
|
| We know that climate change is threatening to make
| massive areas of land uninhabitable, change weather
| patterns in ways which will massively increase water
| scarcity in large parts of the world, cause droughts
| which will be devastating for food production, put
| coastal regions under water, etc. don't you think that
| these effects would cause war and mass starvation?
| LeanderK wrote:
| I have completely no authority in this, but my guess it's some
| sort of path-dependence. I think the problem is that we
| modelled our economy to rely on fossil fuels instead of trying
| to diversify way earlier. A finite resource under increased
| demand (the total population increased and the living standard
| increased rapidly in the last decades) quickly turns from
| abundant to contested.
| willnonya wrote:
| I'll ignore cheap as its subjective but where do you live that
| electricity isn't ubiquitous? are you atill waiting for that
| new fangled indoor plumbing yoo?
| thatfrenchguy wrote:
| That's the mindset that let people in the US to buy giant
| trucks and SUVs that do 20mpg on a good day and now you see
| them at the gas pump being mad gas is at $6 because it wrecks
| their budget. Pretty sad that people don't plan for prices to
| get higher.
| maxerickson wrote:
| It is cheap and ubiquitous, and getting cheaper.
| V1ndaar wrote:
| > and getting cheaper.
|
| Ahh, my electricity bill in Germany must be lying then. Good
| to know!
| ncann wrote:
| Same here in Canada. There may be some reduction in rate
| here and there, but the overall trend is always up.
| rlpb wrote:
| In that time the world population has increased from 3 billion
| to 8 billion. Things like energy, food and construction are our
| most basic needs. In the past, production of these were limited
| by available labor. Today that's not the case. So the same
| resources (eg. productive land and mining resources) have to be
| divided between more people.
| sidewndr46 wrote:
| This is what everyone consistently misses. Many people seem
| to approach shortage and price increases as if we're suddenly
| running out of something. What no one really addresses is
| population has more than doubled in the same time period and
| that consumption of goods and resources has increased per
| person as well.
| mnw21cam wrote:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Too_cheap_to_meter
| PolygonSheep wrote:
| To be fair we could generate a lot more power a lot cheaper
| with circa 1962 (year The Jetsons began) environmental
| legislation.
|
| I mean you would have to compromise on the environment a bit
| but it's by no means impossible to generate a ton of cheap
| electricity. It's not some lost art like Greek fire or Damascus
| steel.
| ngcc_hk wrote:
| Just today the bbc said you can say 100 pound plus. Sigh. Any
| executive summary of which is fake.
| basisword wrote:
| My takeaway from this is that while you may not be able to save
| PSx specific amount, you can make not completely insignificant
| savings in energy usage. While the claims aren't completely
| accurate it is probably a good thing for us to be more mindful of
| our usage.
| thow-58d4e8b wrote:
| On a societal level, once heating, industry, public services
| and transportation are accounted for, we consume around
| 500-1000W per person. Saving a few Watts per family is a
| rounding error. We're talking about the power output of a solar
| panel the size of an A4 paper
|
| This is a failure of state's energy policy, trying to pass the
| blame on regular citizens
| vrfvr wrote:
| Especially true since costs such as carbon emissions aren't
| internalized yet into the electricity cost.
| weego wrote:
| These are completely insignificant savings. The source aligns
| with a piece published this morning on the BBC which is very
| obviously a Govt encouraged piece attempting to push the
| critical failings from them (the Govt) on protecting the most
| vulnerable families from price gouging and speculation in the
| energy markets.
|
| It's just a replay of the carbon footprint playbook.
| BolexNOLA wrote:
| I do think there is something to be said for creating a
| culture of sustainability. The values then become reflected
| in a society's laws. If we as a people have even just a
| baseline consideration of our waste and energy consumption,
| then it stands to reason we'll apply pressure to the truly
| responsible parties over time.
|
| It also helps remove personal politics from the equation if
| everyone already sort of agrees we should be mindful as a
| standard sentiment. The fact that we have folks whose
| identity is tied to pollution, to the point where we had
| people at rallies going "drill baby drill!" barely more than
| a decade ago, says a lot. Remember: the GOP created the EPA.
| They used to be more openly supportive of conservation.
|
| The truly responsible parties love the fact that millions of
| Americans are going to bat for their "right" to trash and
| pollute our country.
| npteljes wrote:
| I agree. In fact I'm insulted at the suggestion of PS30
| savings in YEAR, and I even live in a country where the
| purchasing power of PS30 is much higher than in the UK.
| pydry wrote:
| This was my first thought when I saw that too. It's a
| hamfisted attempt to turn a systemic problem into a "a
| problem of personal responsibility".
|
| Same way that companies that produce a lot of waste are
| weirdly keen on "everybody doing their bit" with recycling:
| https://www.treehugger.com/shell-oil-preaches-personal-
| respo...
|
| Or the way that jaywalking was turned into a crime by the
| motor car companies: https://www.grunge.com/721704/the-truth-
| about-how-jaywalking...
|
| Or the way poverty/homelessness is framed:
| https://www.marketplace.org/2012/10/05/personal-
| responsibili...
| mrpopo wrote:
| Turning off modem/router for the night saves a bit of energy
| though (about enough energy to boil the water for my morning
| tea), with the added benefit of preventing me from compulsive
| internet browsing on my tablet at night.
|
| This obviously won't save the planet or my wallet, but helps me
| with being mindful at least.
| NullPrefix wrote:
| Based on your described power usage, I assume your modem/router
| is actually a regular x86 PC
| jusssi wrote:
| 15W * 8h = 120Wh. For that, you can run a 2000W kettle for
| 216 seconds, or 3.6 minutes.
| NullPrefix wrote:
| OK, I stand corrected. 0.12kWh is a somewhat significant
| amount, enough to boil a cup of tea.
| willnonya wrote:
| Bought in the windows 95 era...
| anonu wrote:
| The solution is to lower the cost of electricity. Why is nobody
| talking about this?!? I jest...
|
| 16 pence / kwh is pricy I think. Thats around $0.2/kwh whereas
| the US average is around $0.13... so around 50% more expensive in
| UK vs US.
| qayxc wrote:
| Wait, so your solution to wasting resources is to make
| resources cheaper so that more can be wasted? Got it...
| aequitas wrote:
| If you live in the Netherlands (or Belgium/Luxemburg/Sweden) and
| have a smart meter it is fitted with a P1 port according to the
| DSMR (Dutch Smart Meter Requirements). If you connect it to a
| RS232 port (and pull some pin high depending on the version) it
| will dump a ASCII "telegram" every 1 or 10 seconds (depending on
| version) with all meter readings, current usage/delivery, gas
| meter readings and some other stats like frequency and phase
| voltage. It's very useful in determining your current power usage
| and "debugging" vampire drain. A good starting point is the HA
| DSMR component page[0].
|
| I personally log the metrics to Prometheus so I can graph them
| over time with Grafana. For groups/devices that don't have a
| dedicated power meter attached I sometimes do a run where I
| switch off all the breakers and then turn them on one by one. The
| live power usage output is really useful to quickly determine how
| much easy group is using.
|
| [0] https://www.home-assistant.io/integrations/dsmr/
| djhworld wrote:
| I'm doing something similar although I don't think smart meters
| in the UK come with a debug port sadly - so I'm scraping a
| third party API instead.
|
| Wrote a small script to regularly ingest the data into SQLite,
| then use Grafana to plot the results :)
| Havoc wrote:
| Which provider / API? I'm on EDF w/ a smart meter but haven't
| seen anything that looks coding accessible
| djhworld wrote:
| I signed up to this app https://play.google.com/store/apps/
| details?id=uk.co.hildebra... and they have an API https://d
| ocs.glowmarkt.com/GlowmarktApiDataRetrievalDocument...
|
| Other people have suggested
| https://data.n3rgy.com/consumer/home as an alternative as
| well
|
| As long as your smart meter is DCC connected they should
| work
| aequitas wrote:
| Check your meter to see if it has a blinking LED. Most meters
| have a pulse LED which blinks X times per kWh consumes.
| Before smart meters where a thing I used to have a light
| sensitive transistor taped to my meter and just count the
| pulses. Even older models might have a digit replaced with a
| mirror on the last indicator dial. Which can also easily be
| read. Another one is magnetic pulse output, which can be read
| with a HAL sensor, but those are mostly found on water
| meters. Don't be satisfied with aggregated low resolution
| scraped metrics is what i'm saying. Per second real-time
| power measuring is the thing you want :).
| djhworld wrote:
| Hahah that's amazing.
|
| My meter is one of the blinking ones yeah.
|
| I'm not sure if I have the patience to add sensors though.
|
| One interesting aspect of the meters is I think they talk
| over zigbee protocol, but I'm not sure how to tap into
| that. I think the in-home display uses it though to display
| "real time usage".
|
| The API I use gives 30m resolution which seems ok enough.
| herpderperator wrote:
| Imagine how much global power would be saved if NOBODY ran
| standby devices overnight. Not practical, but an interesting
| thought.
| satsuma wrote:
| i lived with my mother in law for a short time when i was between
| apartments. she would occasionally go around the house and unplug
| all of my devices in the early mornings before I got up. this was
| originally just the xbox connected to the living room tv, but if
| I had my laptop plugged in (work or personal) it would get
| unplugged too. i don't know if it was a petty "power move"
| (pardon the pun) or if she genuinely thought the standby mode
| appliances were bleeding her dry, but she's a senior electrical
| engineer so she should really know better.
|
| i was considering confronting her and putting in a kill-a-watt
| and paying her directly the couple bucks a month my standby
| devices used in power, but i figured that wasn't worth it.
| abridgett wrote:
| I did this in two different houses and it does depend on if you
| have bad culprits. By far the worst for me was a Zanussi
| washer/dryer with an on/off that went "clunk/click" and popped
| in/out - but would still use 10W (about PS10/year back then). I
| just ignored that switch and used the wall socket switch instead.
|
| A few timers on other devices to turn off bluetooth speakers
| overnight. Over the ten years I lived there it was a decent
| saving.
| nullc wrote:
| I had a single AV receiver that was using over 100w in its "off"
| state, one device alone easily blowing past that PS30 figure.
| noTooMooch wrote:
| Ha; I've always found these nickel and dime savings efforts, as
| if the waste creation at scale is offset by shaving a few
| dollars, laughable
|
| Nah; while the species as a whole is fine to grind forward
| without a care, I'm all in full speed ahead.
|
| Leaving my lights on in empty rooms, generating all the one time
| use waste; front row seats to the apocalypse sounds metal af.
| londons_explore wrote:
| Standby power use varies _widely_ by device.
|
| Of 100 devices around your house, there might be only two with
| unreasonable standby power. But those two will be costing you
| significant amounts of money.
|
| For example, I found my oven clock was using 15 watts. The oven
| is 20 years old, so over those 20 years, the clock (which I never
| use anyway) has cost PS762 (at today's electricity prices). For
| that I could have bought a new oven!
|
| Other surprising high usage devices:
|
| * Audio Amp (on, but silent - 45 watts).
|
| * A power strip - 10 watts.
|
| Nearly all other appliances were < 1 watt on standby/idle, as is
| required of many new devices by European law.
| jandrese wrote:
| What the hell is a power strip doing that needs 10w!?!? Did
| they find some outrageously inefficient bulb to put behind the
| switch?
| jansan wrote:
| As a rule of thumb one Watt standby equals 9KWh per year. If you
| have expensive electricity like we do in Germany with 35 Cent per
| kWh, this is roughly 3 Euro per year.
|
| 10 Watt standby does not sound unplausible I found that my
| subwoofer of a very well known brand consumes about 6 Watts in
| standby, and our old Roomba is very hungry when on standby, too.
|
| Get a device to measure power consumtion for a 15 Euros/Dollars,
| find the energy hogs, and give the device to friends and
| relatives. This will not save the world, but you WILL find some
| pontential for saving energy.
| onion2k wrote:
| Every article that states you can save a small amount of money by
| doing something is tacitly saying it's your own fault if you're
| poor. You ate too many avocadoes, you didn't make your own
| coffee, you didn't turn your TV off at the wall. It's corporate
| PR to shift responsibility for the cost of living from billion
| dollar company profits to individuals who are already struggling.
|
| Journalists who write those articles should be banned from being
| published forever.
| gruez wrote:
| >Every article that states you can save a small amount of money
| by doing something is tacitly saying it's your own fault if
| you're poor. [...] It's corporate PR to shift responsibility
| for the cost of living from billion dollar company profits
|
| That's reading _way_ too much into it, don 't you think?
|
| >You ate too many avocadoes, you didn't make your own coffee,
| you didn't turn your TV off at the wall
|
| The "article" literally says the savings is PS30 a year. Nobody
| thinks that's the reason they're poor.
|
| >Journalists who write those articles should be banned from
| being published forever.
|
| In other words, money saving advice should be banned because
| they might be spewing "corporate PR to shift responsibility"?
| onion2k wrote:
| _That 's reading way too much into it, don't you think?_
|
| I don't think that, no. Or I wouldn't have posted what I
| posted. Corporations spend an _immense_ amount of money on
| PR, and a lot of it goes on "perception shifting". As an
| example, in the early 2000s Shell spent $100m inventing the
| idea of a "personal carbon footprint" so that people would
| focus on the environmental impact of you using 20 plastic
| straws a year instead of Shell burning 400m barrels of oil.
| It worked _brilliantly_.
|
| _The "article" literally says the savings is PS30 a year.
| Nobody thinks that's the reason they're poor._
|
| PS30 a year on this. PS50 a year on something else. PS20 a
| week on a phone. PS5 a week on coffee. And suddenly the
| papers are full of "Poor people can't afford a house because
| they waste their money on things!" People do believe it.
|
| _In other words, money saving advice should be banned
| because they might be spewing "corporate PR to shift
| responsibility"?_
|
| Yes. Money saving advice when it's a paltry amount that won't
| cause a shift in your circumstances is essentially useless,
| _especially_ if the root cause is some corporation trying to
| get out of being responsible for their actions. In this case,
| electricity companies are making record profits and
| increasing prices far in excess of inflation. The media
| should focus on that, not whether or not someone is using
| 20kWh on making LEDs stay on.
| gruez wrote:
| >I don't think that, no. Or I wouldn't have posted what I
| posted. Corporations spend an immense amount of money on
| PR, and a lot of it goes on "perception shifting". As an
| example, in the early 2000s Shell spent $100m inventing the
| idea of a "personal carbon footprint" so that people would
| focus on the environmental impact of you using 20 plastic
| straws a year instead of Shell burning 400m barrels of oil.
| It worked brilliantly.
|
| I'm not denying "perception shifting" doesn't exist, just
| that claiming that "Every article that states you can save
| a small amount of money by doing something" is "corporate
| PR" is a little too broad. This article has problems for
| other reasons, but claiming that an energy conservation NGO
| is acting in bad faith by telling people to conserve energy
| is a stretch.
|
| >PS30 a year on this. PS50 a year on something else. PS20 a
| week on a phone. PS5 a week on coffee. And suddenly the
| papers are full of "Poor people can't afford a house
| because they waste their money on things!" People do
| believe it.
|
| So you're against money/resource saving techniques being
| promulgated because it's ammo for the "millennials are poor
| because they're eating avocado toast" crowd? That seems
| like an overly "we must win at all costs, anyone that helps
| the enemy is an enemy" way of looking at things.
|
| >Yes. Money saving advice when it's a paltry amount that
| won't cause a shift in your circumstances is essentially
| useless, especially if the root cause is some corporation
| trying to get out of being responsible for their actions.
|
| I agree this article is dumb because the savings is only
| PS30, but jumping to the conclusion that it must be part of
| some PR campaign seems premature.
|
| > In this case, electricity companies are making record
| profits and increasing prices far in excess of inflation.
|
| source?
|
| > The media should focus on that, not whether or not
| someone is using 20kWh on making LEDs stay on.
|
| In this case "the media" isn't even involved at all. The OP
| is a blog post from a private citizen, and the "article"
| it's referencing is from an energy conversation NGO. While
| I think it might be worth pointing out energy companies
| profits, that's not really part of the NGO's mission.
| [deleted]
| uuyi wrote:
| So much this. Right behind you there.
| tomthe wrote:
| Yes, you can save more than 30 pound per year by switching of
| standby devices. I just calculated it for my TV:
| https://www.wolframalpha.com/input?i=0.01+kwh+*+24+*365*++0....
| which draws 10 W in standby (which I measured). It results in
| 25EUR per year (I pay ca. 30 cent per kwh). I have lots of other
| standby devices.
| ben-schaaf wrote:
| That's a crazy amount of standby power consumption! That's more
| than my laptop under light usage and way more than a mobile
| phone even under heavy usage. I really hope this isn't common.
|
| As an aside, WA is awesome at units. You can simplify to: 10W
| years * 0.3 EUR/kwh.
| cesarb wrote:
| > That's more than my laptop under light usage and way more
| than a mobile phone even under heavy usage.
|
| Battery-powered devices (which include both laptops and
| mobile phones) are notoriously frugal with their power usage,
| since they have a severely limited power budget (even the
| biggest laptop batteries are limited to 100Wh because of the
| FAA, and mobile phone batteries are also limited by their
| physical size), and they are also compared on that power
| usage (you see on review sites things like "with the screen
| at half brightness and playing a nice movie, the battery
| lasted N hours..."). Wall-powered devices, on the other hand,
| are much less limited; the biggest restriction would be in
| places with 10A wall plugs at 110V (that's the case where I
| live, though "110V" is what the public calls it but it's
| actually 127V), and that's already over 1kW with no time
| limit. So wall-powered devices tend to not optimize their
| power usage (standby or otherwise) as much as battery-powered
| devices.
| electroly wrote:
| Google can do it, too; try it with your example query. I find
| that more convenient because I can just type it into the
| address bar and it loads lightning fast, whereas WA is kinda
| slow. For simple math and unit conversions like this, WA's
| full power isn't necessary.
| Jaxan wrote:
| So I have the same (9W). It is crazy, especially since the
| usage when the TV is on is only 35W.
| 2000UltraDeluxe wrote:
| Many TV's have a small ARM computer running constantly in
| the background, regardless if the screen is on or not.
| djhworld wrote:
| Said this in another comment from a another commenter saying
| their TV sapped 9W inb standy: how old is your TV?
|
| EU regulations state that devices > 2013 must must not consume
| more than 0.5 Watts in standby or in off mode
| Jaxan wrote:
| I measured almost all appliances in my house. And my TV uses
| around 9W in standby, so consistent with your finding. We don't
| have a switch yet and I'm too lazy to (un)plug every time. So
| currently that is all wasted energy.
|
| Mobile phone chargers really don't use much energy at all. So
| these can be left plugged in.
| djhworld wrote:
| > And my TV uses around 9W in standby
|
| How old is your TV?
|
| EU regulations state that devices > 2013 must must not
| consume more than 0.5 Watts in standby or in off mode
|
| 9W is an egregiously high amount, maybe there's some setting
| or something that's keeping your device awake to be sapping
| 9W constantly?
| Jaxan wrote:
| We bought it last year. I think it is a model from 2019 or
| so. Perhaps something is keeping it awake indeed (it is
| connected to WiFi, and that is also how we use it: it is
| not connected by any cable). But there is not much to set
| up, unfortunately.
| ricardo81 wrote:
| Some advice but not exactly ideal for people on low incomes is
| replacing old appliances.
|
| I have an old TV that consumed ~290 watts. Similar TVs today
| consume around 70 watts, say 25% for simplicity.
|
| Variable rate electricity tariffs are ~30p/kWh at the moment.
|
| At ~4 hours of TV a day (I guess more common for older
| households)
|
| 290W * 4 * 365 = 423.4kWh = PS127 @ 30p/kWh
|
| vs
|
| 70W * 4 * 365 = 102.2kWh = PS30 @ 30p/kWh
|
| So a PS400-500 TV pays for itself in 5 years.
| bluedino wrote:
| My 70" OLED draws 130 watts and is probably on 10 hours a day.
| Thanks streaming!
| Stevvo wrote:
| OLED TVs runs pixel refresh compensation cycles whilst in
| standby. These cycles are essential for preventing burn in.
|
| So don't turn off your OLED when you find it using some power in
| standby.
| mdb31 wrote:
| Yeah, this particular myth is common in many EU countries as
| well. Apart from the minimal amount reportedly saved (30 GBP per
| annum in real currency is 37 EUR/USD per year, less than 10 cents
| a day), it does not seem to be particularly true.
|
| I measured this (at the wall socket) over the years, and my
| findings are below.
|
| For battery-powered devices, disconnecting the charger once the
| battery is full does nothing, other than to cause the battery to
| be discharged more rapidly than it would be otherwise. For
| battery health, it's best (if possible) to set a 'start
| recharging' threshold at 90% or so, but that's mostly a device-
| lifetime issue, not a power consumption issue.
|
| For 'mains-powered' devices with a 'soft power-off', like many
| modern coffee machines, microwaves, etc. etc., the power draw in
| 'idle' mode is truly insignificant. You may have an atypical
| (broken?) device, but other than avoiding some transistor whine,
| you truly don't gain anything by powering these off. For devices
| like printers, monitors and TVs, I've never seen any 'idle' power
| consumption that was even noticeable.
|
| Some 'always-on' devices do have significant power requirements.
| Like: your set-top box (since it needs to records the programs
| you scheduled), your modem and/or media converter, and your
| fridge. With these: it's always measure, inquire and replace as
| needed/possible.
|
| For me, my fridge is as efficient as it gets, the fiber-to-
| Ethernet box from my ISP draws minimal power anyway and my
| Mikrotik router and APs are pretty power-efficient as well (like,
| 4 hours runtime on a tiny UPS). The rest goes mostly to my heat
| pump (which also powers my boiler), and in the summer months,
| this always offset by my solar panels, unless cooling
| requirements get way out of hand.
| [deleted]
| PaulHoule wrote:
| I think it's hilarious that the cable box (or satellite box) is
| worse than the others, in fact most of the others put together.
|
| The cable box uses more power when idle than a smartphone uses
| peak, and that doesn't include the display!
|
| As important as they frame the DVR I don't think I've known
| anybody who has cable who really uses the DVR.
| natly wrote:
| How come tweets like these aren't tagged as misinformation
| pessimizer wrote:
| Because they aren't considered political. Platforms are mostly
| only looking for political deviations, something that a
| politician or lobbying group could complain about.
|
| If you tweeted that turning off your _Apple_ devices would save
| 30PS a year, for example, and other people started picking up
| on it, Apple would complain and it would become political.
| Twitter _exclusively_ hunts political deviation; they 're not
| even nipple-hunters like the other platforms.
|
| edit: even its search for threats/abuse seems to be modeled on
| the "Zero Tolerance" policies of suburban schools in the
| '90s-'00s. Posting finger-guns might get you deleted like it
| would have gotten a second-grader suspended.
| willnonya wrote:
| Probably because it's contradicting asinine advice based on
| outdated data and flawed assumptions.
|
| A better version might be tonhave peoole look at what they have
| in their home thats using electricity and why.
| [deleted]
| unreal37 wrote:
| Because telling people to turn off their devices when not in
| use is not harmful.
|
| I mean, I can tell you I drank orange juice this morning when
| in fact I didn't. So it's misinformation. But it's not harming
| you to believe me.
| blitzar wrote:
| > tweets like these
|
| _A quick way to #saveenergy at home is to turn off tablets,
| laptops and consoles as soon as you stop using them, and
| ideally unplug them.
|
| This is a big potential #energy saver and could save you up to
| PS30 a year._
|
| > aren't tagged as misinformation
|
| The only misinformation I see here is _up to PS30 a year_ as
| households would save more than PS30 a year by doing this.
| egeek wrote:
| So I got into this a bit over the past year, and put a
| SmartThings socket behind just about everything in the house. Not
| so much for the cost saving (which will take forever at PS29 for
| each of the SmartThings sockets), but more to understand where
| the power is being used so that we can run for longer on solar +
| batteries.
|
| There's a range of devices that consume practically nothing when
| they are in standby mode, these include: - Phone
| chargers (0 - 1W) - Projectors (0 - 1W) - TVs (0 - 3W
| for the ones we have) - Laptops (3 - 4W for the ones we
| have) - AV amps e.g. Denon (2W) - Coffee Machine e.g.
| Jura (4W) - Printers (0 - 1W)
|
| There's a bunch of low powered devices that stay on all the time
| - Amazon Echo Show (4W) - Presumably the Echos without a
| screen but I haven't tested them
|
| If I turned all of these two groups off in the house when we are
| not using them then we might save close to the PS30/year, but we
| have a lot of them and it's not worth the effort.
|
| There's some devices that you have to keep running, but will
| cycle, these are typically fridges and freezers.
| - Pretty much all around 1W sleep - 2 year old full height
| fridge - peaks at 49W for 7 minutes ever 30 mins or so - 2
| year old full height freezer - peaks at 75W for 10 minutes ever
| 45 mins or so - 1 year old chest freezer - peaks at 76W for
| 12 minutes every 30 mins or so - 10 year old half height
| fridge - peaks at 66W for 30 minutes ever 120 mins or so -
| 2 year old half height wine fridge - load isn't smooth, spikes
| and goes back down, average of about 100W for 10 minutes every 60
| mins or so - 10 year old combined full height fridge and
| freezer - 110W for 17 mins every 50 mins or so
|
| There's not much you can do about these (well I could remove
| some) but they need to stay on.
|
| Then there's some things that can be reduced: - I
| usually walk away from my laptop and leave it running. The
| external monitor goes to sleep, but the laptop itself continues
| to use 33W when left like this. If I put it to sleep instead it
| would go close to 0. Assuming that I leave it like this for 12
| hours each evening, that's 0.033kW \* 0.22p/kWh \* 365days \*
| 12hours = PS31.80 - with this change alone I can hit the headline
| figures - We have a Virgin Media Box and an XBox One X, I
| haven't separated their power usage, they both draw in their
| sleep/standby mode, but together they are using 38W when in
| standby. Using the formula above, switching them off for 12 hours
| would save PS36.61 - Lights, yes, they are only 0.5W each
| for the Philips Hue, but we've 32 of them in the kitchen alone.
| That's 16W in standby, for say an average of 18 hours a day over
| the year when they aren't being used. PS20.56 for the kitchen
| lights to be "off".
|
| Problem with these articles are that some older folk in older
| houses go round switching off the telly rather than using standby
| on the remote. That's fine, you might save PS1 or PS2 over the
| course of the year, but the house is old, the sockets are close
| to the floor, the risk of you tripping/falling is much higher.
| It's never worth it to save PS1.
|
| Where it does make sense is people who have a few consoles in the
| house, leaving them in standby mode (particularly the one where
| it can download updates in the background), or just walking away
| from their computer and not putting it to sleep properly. Switch
| it off instead and you'll save the headline figures easily.
|
| (edited for formatting)
| jansan wrote:
| I am using a monitor light bar (Xiaomi) instead of a ceiling
| light when working at night. This gives a very nice atmosphere
| and saves a few Watts, but it will take some years until the
| energy savings compensate the price for the light bar.
| djhworld wrote:
| One note about the consoles.
|
| The Xbox Series X has two modes
|
| - Instant On (uses about 10-11W in standby) - Energy Saver
| (uses about 1-2W in standby)
|
| I think it defaults to "instant on" which is ludicrous. Energy
| saver mode is better, and still supports downloading updates if
| required.
| nicgrev103 wrote:
| I literally read an article on this earlier claiming I can save
| PS147 https://www.telegraph.co.uk/bills-and-utilities/gas-
| electric... I am now regretting my decision to buy some smart
| plugs so that I can cut power to appliances overnight.
| Tarsul wrote:
| There are rules in the EU that allow newer devices only 0.5W or
| 1W standby power, so basically we have to thank the EU that
| standby devices don't kill us by thousand cuts. I recently bought
| a device to measure my power consumption and most devices (e.g.
| monitor, TV, receiver, coffee machine) only use 0 to 0.7W when in
| standby, so definitely negligible. However, my dvd player uses 3W
| in standby because it's from the 2000s (before this EU law). btw.
| next to my washing machine and dishwasher the device that uses
| the most power over time is my 42" plasma tv (from ~2008) with
| 150-200W. My 32" monitor only uses 22W. My PC uses 40-60W when
| browsing or watching movies. 200W when playing Elden Ring.
|
| I think it's worthwhile to check your power consumption. If
| anyone still has not changed their lightbulps to LEDs, please do
| it yesterday (a change from 40W to 10W is HUGE).
| ars wrote:
| In the US it was in 2001: https://georgewbush-
| whitehouse.archives.gov/news/releases/20...
|
| Don't know if that was before or after the EU.
| milgrim wrote:
| And despite these rules my Sony TV (KD-65XG9505) bought in 2019
| uses 20 to 30 watts in standby. Only disabling the internal Wi-
| Fi and restarting it gets this down to about 1 watt. This seems
| to be a very common problem with Sony TVs and I have no idea
| how they don't get into any kind of trouble with this.
| aequitas wrote:
| I have a Sony to, standby is around 1W unless I enable some
| features like Airplay, then it jumps to 20W. Enabling the
| feature will show a warning in the UI that "this might
| increase power consumption". I think this is how they get
| away with this. They show this warning with a lot of
| settings. Also a lot of TV's have an energy saver picture
| profile which is horrible to look at for movies, but it's
| included to pass the rating I guess.
| milgrim wrote:
| Tried a lot of settings, but with enabled network I never
| got the standby power consumption down. It should also be
| expected that the TV uses the advertised amount of energy
| in standby mode with the default settings, which was really
| not the case for me. And don't get me started on this
| ,,might increase power consumption" message. This might
| actually not be Sony's fault, but the EU's, but it really
| gets annoying when it pops up all the time.
| aequitas wrote:
| For me (KD-55X9000H) the default settings give low power
| consumption. Enabling WiFi does not make a difference.
| Enabling HomeKit Wakeup (not Airplay, as I mentioned
| before) gives a huge power usage. Disabling it again
| doesn't bring it down. Only after a factory reset I got
| it down again. Took me a while to figure this out. Also,
| it might depend on your firmware version.
| masklinn wrote:
| > it's included to pass the rating I guess.
|
| I see the automobile industry taught well.
| aequitas wrote:
| Indeed, they even have their own dieselgate scandal where
| tv's recognise reviewers test patterns and adjust
| settings accordingly:
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rhto9MmiExE
| lokimedes wrote:
| As someone living in an electrically heated and well insulated
| house, all that vampire power is heat+convenience. My heat pump
| is surely 4x more efficient, but that 50W of standby power is not
| really wasted.
| cm2187 wrote:
| Why would microwave oven clocks, tumble-dryers, dishwashers use a
| considerable amount of power when not in use? Surely there is a
| LED light but that should be tiny, and keeping the time should be
| even tinier.
| qayxc wrote:
| There are considerable losses on the power delivery side.
|
| The appliances don't have very efficient power supplies that
| convert the input voltage (e.g. 230V or 120V) down to the
| single digit voltages used by the clocks and LEDs. It's simply
| not a concern for devices that usually consume power in the kW
| range when operating.
|
| The simplest way to save power is to literally just pull the
| plug after use. It's not even much of an inconvenience either
| if the plug is reasonably close to the appliance.
| cm2187 wrote:
| My oven and microwaves will refuse to function unless you set
| the clock. It would be an inconvenience in my case.
| qayxc wrote:
| Sounds like bad design to me. But yeah, if that's the case
| I agree that's indeed a major inconvenience.
| jihadjihad wrote:
| A lot of household appliances like this are hardwired at the
| breaker panel. I'm having a hard time believing that running
| to the panel before and after each use of a dishwasher, oven,
| washer, dryer, etc. is something anyone would actually do.
| qayxc wrote:
| Most ovens are hardwired, true. Washers, dryers, and
| dishwashers, however usually aren't hardwired (at least in
| countries with 240V AC) - might depend on the country,
| though.
|
| Personally, I've yet to come across a washing machine, dish
| washer, or dryer that's hardwired. Typical appliances in my
| region look like this [1], [2], [3], [4]. Note the cords
| and plugs.
|
| [1] dryer: https://elektricks.com/Stromanschluss_022.jpg
|
| [2] washing machine: https://image.architonic.com/img_pro2-
| 4/117/4868/waschgeraet...
|
| [3] dishwasher back: https://www.kuechenjournal.com/wp-
| content/uploads/2018/07/Ku...
|
| dishwasher front: https://img.moebelplus.de/xlarge/gaggenau
| _df251160_szene.jpg
|
| [4] dryer: https://image.coolblue.de/840x473/content/5a1961
| ba7ab2e4818d...
| fguerraz wrote:
| Also, even if your devices on standby draw the equivalent of PS30
| of energy per year, and even if you turned them off completely,
| you would still not save PS30 a year if you live in a country
| where you need heating in the winter.
|
| Because apart from light escaping by your windows, almost all
| that energy is turned into heat, and if it wasn't there, you'd
| have to heat up your home more.
| astrobe_ wrote:
| Perhaps related or not, I was wondering about the energy loss
| of AC/DC converters that are often used to power the device.
| This clearly happens when the device is switched on - the
| converter is a bit warm - but maybe it also happens when it is
| off ?
| smallpipe wrote:
| IIRC, a kWh of electricity is about 3x more expensive than a
| gas kWh. You're correct if your heating is electric (resistive)
| though.
| newaccount74 wrote:
| You are right, but your heating system is probably cheaper
| (unless you have simple electric radiators).
|
| If you have a heat pump, it will generate about 3W of heat from
| 1W of electricity, so it's 3 times more expensive to heat with
| standby devices that with your heat pump.
|
| If you heat with gas, it's much cheaper per kWh than
| electricity, but I'm not sure what the ratio is.
| pbhjpbhj wrote:
| And if you use air-conditioning for cooling?
| francisofascii wrote:
| Yep, Your device heat adds to the load on your AC. So if you
| going to bother with unplugging devices, it is more
| beneficial on those hot summer days.
| fguerraz wrote:
| Then I guess you don't care about neither the environment nor
| money, so it's kind of a moot point.
|
| (I am not talking about using it in reverse / heat-pump ONLY)
| yabones wrote:
| Exactly! Some people look at me with disgust for running an
| inefficient old AMD PC as my home file/print/backup server, but
| it's made the coldest room in my house very comfortable during
| the winter months. There are no central heating vents in this
| room so I would be using electric heat regardless, it just so
| happens that my heater is also filling an important technical
| role as well.
| e2le wrote:
| Let's not focus solely on standby devices. How much energy could
| be saved by simply disabling Windows update or discontinuing use
| of other CPU inefficient software? I suspect that across the
| entire population, it would add up to be a non-significant
| number.
| usrusr wrote:
| Long lived hifi equipment can be a huge offender, plenty of stuff
| still around from the decades between broad introduction of
| remote controls (before that, they were usually hard off) and
| broad introduction of switching PSU which aren't quite as bad as
| transformers (but early and/or cheap can certainly be bad as
| well)
|
| But I think "everyone" already knows that standby devices are a
| convenience that one should strive to avoid, the current fight is
| between people who insist on unplugging the USB charger vs those
| who refuse to do so. On this battleground, I think I see a strong
| case of perfect as enemy of the good: "refusers" are likely to
| react to pressure by ignoring the issue completely and might
| easily miss out on meaningful low hanging fruit.
| 8fingerlouie wrote:
| It highly depends on what devices you have.
|
| With recent Danish prices fluctuating between EUR0.5 and EUR1 per
| kWh, i have been going through my devices, and there were a few
| of them that surprised me.
|
| I have a couple of Sonos speakers, and apparently every Sonos
| speaker draws 3-6W while idle/standby
| (https://support.sonos.com/s/article/256?language=en_US). Having
| 4 speakers means about 20W idle power consumption, which amounts
| to 175 kWh/year (14.5 kWh/month), and even at EUR0.5/kWh, that's
| EUR7 per month just keeping speakers on standby.
|
| Another "hidden source" of power draw is a PlayStation. While
| it's fairly cheap keeping it on "standby" (6-8W), streaming media
| from it takes about 90W. For comparison an Apple TV uses between
| 3 and 7W
| (https://www.apple.com/environment/pdf/products/appletv/Apple...)
| for the same.
| 8fingerlouie wrote:
| Hue lightbulbs use about 0.5W in their powered off state. So 10
| of those is another 87 kWh per year in idle consumption alone.
| AndrewThrowaway wrote:
| I remember my father powering off TV. It was this old SONY TV
| with an actual power off switch at the front. The switch that
| does click/clack and breaks the power.
|
| Him saying that he will save some money. Let it be those 30GBP a
| year. I asked how much will it cost to change the switch when it
| actually breaks from this constant clicking.
|
| He stopped turning off the TV.
| pbhjpbhj wrote:
| So you used FUD to convince him to waste electricity.
|
| The MTBF of the switch was probably 30k cycles.
| AndrewThrowaway wrote:
| I can't remember the exact model of course but it must have
| been some 2000s SONY WEGA Trinitron. Quick search says it
| uses 0.3W in standby.
|
| 30k cycles / 365 days / ~4 cycles a day (morning news,
| evening) is ~ 20 years of clicking.
|
| Let's say TV is in standby 20h per day. So ~ 146 000h * 0.3W
| will be ~ 44 000Wh or 44kWh.
|
| 44kWh * PS0.16 or so equals to ~PS10.
| lr4444lr wrote:
| Even if you could, would it be worth the aggravation of the
| on/off wait to do this every time you finished with these devices
| to earn an extra PS2.5 a month?
| PaulHoule wrote:
| People like Amory Lovins have long identified cases where it
| seems that you could spend $A today and then save $B a month
| later and after n months $nB >> $A. There are a long list of
| these where it seems there is a business case to invest $A in
| energy conservation yet people don't act.
|
| One trouble is that energy consumption is noisy. I remember
| replacing all the incandescent bulbs in my house (circa 2002)
| with compact fluorescent bulbs, expecting a few dollars a month
| savings, but given the fluctuations of the bill those savings
| were invisible.
|
| A few years later I was involved a project that involved
| evaluating the effectiveness of improvements in building energy
| efficiency at a large university and that turned out to be pretty
| difficult. We tried modelling the energy consumption of buildings
| based on the weather and found there was still a large residual
| of what seemed like random variation that typically dwarfed the
| effects of energy improvement upgrades. It could be that our
| model wasn't a good model, but it turns out to be very hard to
| prove that the energy and money savings advocated by the likes of
| Amory Lovins are real, so that's one reason why people don't
| invest in them.
| scraft wrote:
| I heard this PS30 saving stuff on the radio this morning, and it
| made me shake my head a little. I remember when I got a socket
| adapter that measures power consumption, and I went around
| checking all my appliances, eager to find out which are drawing
| lots of power, excited at the money savings. Started with my old,
| huge, plasma TV, that is the best part of 15 years old - surely
| chugging loads of power in standby? Nope, next to nothing.
| Monitors, same. Network switches, same. Essentially I didn't find
| anything in my property that was doing anything unexpected.
| Having hot water (which I get via electricity as my flat doesn't
| have gas) for a single day will use up more energy than I'd save
| unplugging all my devices. Similar for heating (again,
| electricity based) on a colder day in winter would cost more than
| all the standby devices.
|
| I remember a long time ago (25 years?) someone 'invented' a
| device where you plug your TV into it, and it has an IR receiver
| to go with it, you program it to respond to your TVs power button
| (on the remote control), and then when you go to put your TV into
| standby, the plug then turns off too, and when you switch it on
| it does the opposite. At the time it was being touted as the
| money saver, and I got the impression (although never actually
| tested!) TVs back then did draw a lot in standby, so this
| 'invention' was a legitimately good one. But it didn't seem to
| really take off, I am assume because standby was rapidly
| implemented in a way where there is such minimal electrical draw
| that it would be pointless.
| farias0 wrote:
| A good rule of thumb, and I hope someone more knowledgeable can
| correct me if I'm wrong, is that stuff that generate more heat
| will consume more power. So hot shower, iron, curling iron,
| hairdryer, rice cooker, this kind of stuff. Electronics that
| generate minimal heat will consume minimal power in general.
| thow-58d4e8b wrote:
| Correct, and the difference is not even close - anything to
| do with temperature manipulation consumes orders of magnitude
| more. Literally, not figuratively
|
| The laptop I'm writing this on consumes around 10W. Kettle
| 2100W
|
| Making one coffee in the morning consumes enough electricity
| to power the laptop for the whole workday
|
| The idle power consumption of my home is dominated by the
| fridge and freezer (around 150W combined). Idle mode of any
| other devices is a rounding error
| Gigachad wrote:
| It's just basic energy physics. Making something hot or cold
| is real work. Same with moving something or producing light.
| But light is extremely "cheap" compared to the rest.
| Computing data or rendering a video game isn't real work and
| would consume no power if it wasn't for the inefficiency of
| current flowing through the chip making it hot.
| atq2119 wrote:
| If I remember my long ago physics classes correctly,
| irreversible computation inherently costs energy: you can't
| get its energy "consumption" down to zero because of
| entropy, no matter how efficient the technology. Our
| computer architectures are far from reversible in a
| physical sense. If they were, you could run programs in
| reverse. That said, the minimum amount of energy required
| is an absolutely tiny rounding error compared to the waste
| heat of today's technology.
| kqr wrote:
| And if the heat goes into water, it needs even more power
| because water is notoriously hard to heat up.
|
| At one point I owned many appliances that leaked heat, and I
| think I learned to estimate how much power they drew simply
| by putting my hand on them and feeling how hot they were. I'm
| not sure I have that superpower anymore. (Obviously it was
| never that exact, because it depends on many other things
| like volume, material, isolation, etc. But you can get fairly
| close for common household things - between a finger and a
| few heads in size, surrounded by air, plastic case.)
| ballenf wrote:
| Or to put it another way -- if hot water goes down the
| drain (shower, clothes or dish washing, etc.), then that's
| another place the waste energy is going.
| firebird84 wrote:
| Better down the drain then to radiate it back into your
| air. Then you gotta spend more energy pumping that heat
| outside (if you live in a hotter climate like I do).
| jhenkens wrote:
| Alternatively, use it to warm up the cold water coming
| into the shower (I'd guess the largest usage of hot water
| in a home). Warmer "cold" water mixing with the hot water
| means less hot water used out of the hot water heater. My
| understanding, placing this only on the cold supply to
| the shower is it'll only impact your showers.
| https://ecodrain.com/en/
| mort96 wrote:
| In general, all the electricity consumed by an electrical
| device gets converted into heat. If your GPU uses 250W of
| power, it generates 250W of heat. If your whole computer
| draws 1kW from the wall, it generates 1kW of heat. If your
| little raspberry pi and its power supply together draws 15W
| from the wall, it generates 5W of heat. A 1500W electrical
| space heater converts 1500W of electricity into 1500W of
| heat.
|
| So yeah, you're not wrong.
| physicsguy wrote:
| They said PS150 on Radio 4 this morning!
| nicgrev103 wrote:
| Telegraph reporting PS147 today
| https://www.telegraph.co.uk/bills-and-utilities/gas-
| electric...
| mmikeff wrote:
| I thought the same, and my Smart Sony TV claims very low
| standby consumption, but when it is on the Wifi and sat there
| ready to Airplay too it consumes something close to 27W all
| night long. I setup a smart plug to turn it off at night on a
| schedule.
|
| Also seen that my Hifi Amp draws a good few watts on standby.
|
| We have recurring argument in my house where my partner tells
| me I should have turned the LED lights off to save electricity
| and I tell them to close the curtains to keep the heat in. In
| truth I have no idea which wastes more energy/money
| spicyjpeg wrote:
| A nice side effect of people doing this is that, depending on
| where you live, you might be able to obtain these older, less
| power efficient devices for relatively cheap on the used
| market. Of course if you can barely afford electricity buying
| them is probably not a bright idea, but for someone with e.g.
| their own PV system it can be a great way to save some money
| while also reducing the amount of e-waste going to landfills.
|
| Even better, this is not limited to large power hungry
| appliances. You can build a surprisingly decent gaming handheld
| out of an old flagship phone with the help of rooting and some
| hardware mods [1], basically taking advantage of the low resale
| value of Android devices.
|
| [1] https://youtube.com/watch?v=px1A6XptqhQ
| bombcar wrote:
| And if you're in an area that gets cold, waste heat isn't so
| bad - in the winter.
| mmcnl wrote:
| 100% efficiency is rather low for heating. Heat pumps
| easily give you 400%. Efficiency in this case calculated
| as: generated energy (in heat) / electrical energy.
| Efficiency goes beyond 100% because heat is extracted from
| air or water.
| lkbm wrote:
| True, it's not a full loss. A heat pump can easily be 400%
| efficient, though, so I'd rather lean on that except in
| _extreme_ cold.
|
| Still, not a bad idea to run Folding@Home all winter.
| titzer wrote:
| IIUC you need a higher temperature source _from which_ to
| pump heat, so in the winter, where do you get that
| temperature differential?
| bombcar wrote:
| At a certain temperature differential you need to source
| "heat" from elsewhere, which is why up north you either
| need a geothermal heat pump (underground piping) or you
| supplement with gas or electric heat.
|
| Some very efficient pumps can work down to 0 degrees, but
| most start losing efficiency at 25 to 40 (Fahrenheit).
|
| For some parts of the world, a heat pump is perfect -
| pump in heat in the winter and heat out in the summer,
| but when the outside temperature can hit -40o Fahrenheit
| (which is -40o Celsius), you're gonna need something
| else.
| outworlder wrote:
| For the overwhelming majority of the world they are
| perfect. Even in high latitudes, they might only reach
| those extremes for a few days in a year, that's when you
| would require a backup.
|
| Losing efficiency is fine since they are so ridiculously
| efficient to begin with.
| jhenkens wrote:
| Thankfully, you are wrong about that! Just like you don't
| need a cooler source _from which to source cold_ in the
| summer with AC. Technology Connections has a fun (well,
| to me) video on how heat pumps work and are great.
| Literally just AC units running in reverse, thanks to
| having a valve.
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7J52mDjZzto
| extra88 wrote:
| Yes, Technology Connections is a great channel and added
| a couple of new videos about heat pumps in the past
| month.
|
| https://www.youtube.com/c/TechnologyConnections/videos
| ryankrage77 wrote:
| The temperature differential is between the outside
| temperature and -273degC. There's still heat energy to be
| captured even on a cold day.
| lmt55 wrote:
| This is not true, any more than your fridge needing a
| source of cold from which to cool itself down.
| darrenf wrote:
| > _I remember a long time ago (25 years?) someone 'invented' a
| device where you plug your TV into it, and it has an IR
| receiver to go with it, you program it to respond to your TVs
| power button (on the remote control), and then when you go to
| put your TV into standby, the plug then turns off too, and when
| you switch it on it does the opposite. At the time it was being
| touted as the money saver, and I got the impression (although
| never actually tested!) TVs back then did draw a lot in
| standby, so this 'invention' was a legitimately good one. But
| it didn't seem to really take off, I am assume because standby
| was rapidly implemented in a way where there is such minimal
| electrical draw that it would be pointless._
|
| I had a couple of these (in fact I probably still have them),
| from the 2000s - an Intelliplug and Intellipanel - the later
| being an 8-way plug. I used it for a TV, 5.1 amp/receiver, blu-
| ray player, Xbox360, Sky+, Wii, and Squeezebox Radio. The Sky+
| box was in the "always on" socket so it could record stuff at
| all times, while the TV was in "if this comes on, turn on
| everything". I convinced myself I was doing a good thing for
| the planet and my finances, but I never measured it. Blindly
| believing it was far preferable to spending any effort on
| proving I'd been a fool, especially since I needed the sockets
| anyway - I don't recall the price being that much different to
| any other 8-way I looked at.
| dTal wrote:
| >if this comes on, turn on everything
|
| Eco-friendly or not, I'm impressed; detecting power draw and
| using that as a signal is actually a legitimately clever
| solution to the problem of wanting to conveniently switch
| multiple things at once. The only caveat I can think of is
| that some devices probably don't like being switched at the
| wall.
| mercutio2 wrote:
| I've found these devices to be finicky. You have to set the
| threshold of current flow that matches your TV, and
| sometimes switching from one input device to another will
| spike power consumption low enough to turn things off in a
| way you don't want.
|
| But it is a very cool idea.
| rhino369 wrote:
| My power company sent me a power strip that has a somewhat
| similar feature. It constantly powers the TV, but the rest of
| the strip is turned off when the TV is off. It's so you won't
| waste power having Roku, etc., always running.
| traceroute66 wrote:
| > No, you can't save PS30 per year by switching off your
| "standby" devices
|
| I suspect this is probably true of modern devices with modern
| power supplies.
|
| No doubt if you've got a house full of 10+ year old gadgets then
| they possibly have more inefficient power supplies.
|
| Its likely worth considering modernising old kit because they'll
| be power-hungry during active use too, which will likely cost you
| a lot more than the PS30 a year you'll save by turning them off
| overnight !
| bencollier49 wrote:
| The BBC ran an interesting piece of advice this morning on saving
| money from "vampire devices":
|
| "There are smart plugs you can buy which will let you check
| everything is turned off from your phone".
|
| How much power do the smart plugs use to listen on wifi?
| mordae wrote:
| Good ones should manage below 0.1W. But I don't thing many are
| that efficient. So <1W.
| bencollier49 wrote:
| It's interesting - someone looked at their smart plug and it
| was pulling 1.2W, the cost of which comes to more than some
| of the devices they might be attached to - assumes saving
| electricity is your only goal - in that case not necessarily
| the best bet.
| timrichard wrote:
| Out of interest, I just checked my Philips Hue smart switch
| (Zigbee) using my measuring plug. It reported 0.2W.
| e2le wrote:
| I have a Smart Plug flashed with Tasmota firmware, it uses 0.3W
| continuously (PS0.73/year) and 0.7W with the relay activated.
| I'm sure there's smart plug's which use more efficient power
| supplies and/or MCU. The esp8266 isn't exactly known for being
| power efficient.
|
| I suspect that it would be more cost effective to worry about
| the energy consumption of Windows update than to worry about a
| smart plug.
| cwkoss wrote:
| Unfortunate shortened url in that tweet: "Find out more here:
| http://ensvgtr.uk/pS1ut"
| Hamuko wrote:
| My one-occupant apartment is currently averaging about 0.15 kWh
| for the hours when I'm asleep. With my current electricity price,
| 0.1043 EUR/kWh, I could perhaps save 11.30 EUR in a month by
| completely eliminating that 0.15 kWh draw. Obviously, that's not
| realistic since I want my fridge to stay cool, I want my Wi-Fi
| beaming across the apartment, I want my NAS running services and
| I want my air purifier circulating air, even if I'm concious or
| even in the apartment.
|
| I think I'm currently on pace to save about 2 kWh/day with my new
| computer though, so that's something at least.
| piquadrat wrote:
| Just yesterday I noticed that a device installed by the cable TV
| company in my house (a WISI VX 2030 amplifier, according to the
| sticker) was warm to the touch. Measuring its power consumption,
| it uses a constant 15 watt, so about 130kwh/year.
|
| I don't use cable.
| jandrese wrote:
| Cable Modems are notorious energy hogs. I'm pretty sure some of
| the ones I've seen run their CPU at 100% all of the time in
| busywait loops. They are always warm to the touch.
| kwhitefoot wrote:
| Did you turn it off?
| piquadrat wrote:
| Yes, I unplugged it.
| cardiffspaceman wrote:
| It seems like it's part of the cable plant?
|
| https://www.wisial.com/product/vx-2030-065/
|
| "The VX 2030 is a location feeding in-house amplifier"
|
| Did your service say the same quality after you unplugged
| it? Did that of other people in your building?
|
| It seems weird that they would "install" this in your
| residence.
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