Electronic clocks in applicances?

Then they are the ones to get if you're worried about idle power usage. If they're cheap enough then maybe they'll make an impact.

Cheers.

Ken

Reply to
Ken Taylor
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Only the problem is that the ones with just the mechanical timer tend to be the ultra-low-end ones where the door barely fits when new and after a few months they leak microwaves quite impressively (though they are probably still legal).

BTW, I understand that people want TVs with remote-control to power them on and off, I agree that most people would be too lazy to get off their arse to turn on the TV. What I do propose is that if someone came up with a very very cheap way of getting say 0.2W at 5Volts efficiently from 240Vac, then the TV set would not need to draw 10Watts just to run a little remote control receiver that probably only draws a couple of mA at 5V.

Chris

Reply to
Chris Jones

I suggest you get a power meter and measure it.

I wouldn't mind paying more for power. If you think about it, for the rate of pay most people in wealthy countries earn per hour, you could probably buy 200kW (or often much more) of electric power for the same number of hours. That's a lot of power and I reckon that it is fantastically cheap. If you work out the amount of effort it would be to generate even 1kW for yourself, it is amazing how cheap electric power is.

As you say there are more effective things to do than switching off the TV at the socket, and insulating your house or installing a solar water heater would be good choices, but if I had the choice of a TV that used 0.1W instead of 10W when it is off, then it would be a worthwhile feature to me. Any consumption of resources which people do not derive some enjoyment from is wasteful, in my opinion. I would rather that those resources be preserved so that someone (maybe me) could enjoy the benefits of consuming them later. I also disagree with the popular belief that each generation of people should be more numerous than the previous one so that the older generation can enjoy a large pension and the young generation can pay low taxes. The logical conclusion is that at some time there will be a sufficient number of people that life becomes less enjoyable because the total resources available divided by the number of people is not enough per person in order to lead a pleasant life. Some would say that this situation was passed a while ago.

Chris

Reply to
Chris Jones

Here's one I chose at random:

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I'll quote:

Standby power consumption = 0.15W

Now, let's get with the programme and switch to Solar power for hot water and forget this silliness about standby power consumption figures. I can't find the reference, but I recall that the US EPA legislated that all devices which use standby power must reduce the level to below 1 Watt, by such and such a date. It would seem that Sony (at least) have managed this trivial piece of engineering.

Now, let's discuss something meaningful: Does anyone have experience with a good, stainless steel Solar hot water system? THAT is the way I am going to reduce my power consumption. I've just chucked out my 125 Watt flood lights in my XLTastic heater/light/fan systems. I installed these new Philips, warm white 23 Watt compact flurous. Very impressive. Brighter than the floods and only 7 Bucks! Stick your worries about standby power figures up yer bum. It's a complete furphy.

--
Trevor Wilson
www.rageaudio.com.au
Reply to
Trevor Wilson

Yes if your TV only uses 0.15W that is fine. If your TV + set top box uses

40 Watts all the time, as I measured in my parent's house, then that is worth thinking about. (The TV by itself was about 10W switched off with the remote.) Even if you don't give a rat's arse about the environment, 40W is roughly $35 a year, so if you keep your TV + set top box for say 10 years then it should be worth spending at least $100 to buy ones more like the one you mentioned above, even when you factor in the interest rate that you could get on that $100. Personally I don't like the waste of resources either but most people don't care about that.

And yes I agree with you that the solar water heater is a good idea and the compact fluoros too.

Chris

Reply to
Chris Jones

I can agree with what you're saying but I think your priorities are wrong. When you're travelling at 100km/hr towards a cliff you don't check that rear-view mirror is correctly adjusted. :-)

Seriously, if, as has been said elsewhere, standby power consumption is coming down to about 1% of the present amount, then we're heading in the right direction (ie. cliff being averted). This is a good thing. But the heating thing is still the major area.

Cheers.

Ken

Reply to
Ken Taylor

Yes, it can add up. Latent power consumption for typical applinces can range from say one watt to tens of watts depending on what it is and how well it is designed. A lot of the time people will simply leave stuff on instead of turning it off. DVD players and Set Top Boxes for instance simply get left on and the TV switched to standby mode.

There are several manufacturers who advertise their stuff as having "low standby power", so I guess they are at least thinking about it. My Samsung VCR was advertisd like that as a big feature, although I'm not sure of it's actual latent power consumption.

The average home can easily have a few dozen standby power appliances, so it does all add up. Some of it's needed and some of it's not. I've got my entire entertainment system powered through one conveniently located power point, so I switch it all off at the wall when not being used. It's actually very convenient because everything powers back up to exactly where it left off before. Using the remotes (all 4 of them) just to switch everything into standby mode would take longer and be more hassle!

Check out the Steve Ciarcia article on the issue for how much his home takes - ouch! :

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Dave :)

Reply to
David L. Jones

Coming from an industrial background in New Zealand I see this problem all the time.

I often wonder how people measure this power used by devices in standby. Most of the portable meters that are available are not sensitive enough to measure down to under 1W nor are they capable of measuring out of phase or true power.

Let me introduce you people to a little problem known as bad power factor.

In Industry We actually can turn on water heating and capacitors to reduce the total load on the system.

An even bigger factor to be considered is the bad power factor of our power systems caused by switchmode power supplies used in modern electronics and heavy industrial motors. A bad power factor is where an appliance draws AC current that is not in sync with the voltage. This causes high apparent currents which if we relate back to your TV, the cheaper meters are not true RMS this means that if the meter was to read the power drawn by the TV. It would appear as 10w on the meter but it's true power could be only about

0.2 - 0.5w. I agree that solar power hot water would reduce total load on our system but we need some large resistance loads to reduce our terrible power factor.

As far as the supply authorities are concerned this power factor is a way for them to get more money out of industry. it has only recently been enforced that in a new industrial installation that power factor correction units be put in to reduce the load. but the real problem is that as we get more sophisticated electronics using swiutchmode supplies and as air conditioning units become popular in our homes the combined effect of these loads cause our power supply to have a bad power factor.

The effects of a bad power factor is first of all the top and bottom of the ac supply sine wave is flattened. this in effect is a dc point on the supply. this causes motors and transformers to become less efficient as much as 60% of their maximum capacity. the main effects are excessive heating in their windings.

If I take for example an industrial welder on it's own it draws a maximum current of 50A but if we put a capacitor across it's supply for power factor correction we can reduce it's current to 30A. so as you can see by putting this correction in place we can save 40% energy in this case.

So why don't companies put in this feature it's because it is not a well known effect and the average person doesn't understand, Another thing mains rated AC capacitors are expensive. So if the consumer doesn't know it has a negative effect on the supply why bother.

in my opinion as our supply load reduices the line capacity we need to install power factor correction on our supply.

In a nutshell motors and appliances peak in their current draw before the voltage is at a maximum. power factor correction capacitors draw current after the voltage maximum. so if we can measure the amount the voltage and current are different we can correct it by placing capacitors in the circuit.

i could keep giong on about the effects but i will leave it at this.

Reply to
Greig Corlett

one hell of a misconception

news flash

Halogen lights are worse than normal lights. people think that because they are low voltage they are efficient. Have you seen how hot they get and how hot the transformers get. This is all waste energy. all halogen light fittings are made of high temp ceramic and the cables are made of high temp insulation because they get so hot. when installing them in a ceiling there the manufacture specifies 150mm diameter with no insulation compared with

100mm for a standard 240v recess downlight. these are things that we aren't told when we buy these things. I wonder how many people who are over fussed on energy saving put these lights in because they think they are efficient.
Reply to
Greigcorlett

Who had the misconception in what you replied to?

Cheers.

Ken

Reply to
Ken Taylor

**They ARE more efficient than regular incanescent. Not by a huge amount though.

Have you seen how hot they get and how

**Two words: 'Electronic transformers'. Additionally, a transformer SHOULD incur a penalty of around 10-20% at most. That still puts halogens higher than incandescent in the efficiency stakes. Running lots of halogens from a single transformer will increase efficiency still further.

This is all waste energy. all halogen light

**They buy them because they look trendy. People don't care about efficiency. If they did, then they'd be using Solar heating for their hot water.
--
Trevor Wilson
www.rageaudio.com.au
Reply to
Trevor Wilson

DVD

be

see

a

Transformers AC that is are far more efficient than your stating , normally

95-98 percent

insulation

Reply to
Agent " 86 " ®

**Depends on the transformer. Go talk to a transformer manufacturer and get back to me. Some, cheap, crappy halogen transformers are probably no better than 70% efficient (my seat-of-the-pants guesstimate).
--
Trevor Wilson
www.rageaudio.com.au
Reply to
Trevor Wilson

Worst case 77%, best case 93% with most around 86% efficiency. 500GW Hrs are estimated to be wasted per year in Australia.

Reply to
Mark Harriss

I suppose one of the reasons why I like the idea of attacking standby power consumption is that I am not asking anyone to accept any kind of cut in their standard of living because if the appliance was actually doing something that its owner was enjoying then I wouldn't classify it as standby power. A slightly more intelligent circuit design can cut the power greatly with no perceptible loss of usability to the user in many cases. You mention that power consumption is coming down to 1% of the present amount; I think this will only happen if it is perceived by the manufacturers to be something that influences consumers' buying decisions.

For the same reason I like the idea of insulating houses, it allows you to have a more pleasant temperature for less overall cost, the difficulty here is that most people would prefer to put off the cost of warming their house until the fuel bill arrives rather than paying for insulation up front, even if the insulation would result in a lower total cost and a nicer temperature too.

Chris

Reply to
Chris Jones

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