People from the Spark community offered some very helpful tips for how to assess how much energy you’re using in the home, and what to do about it.
Here are some more interesting links we’ve discovered recently:
New York Times article on “vampire” power loss (has some valuable links to energy appetite of average appliances)
The Treehugger blog offers tips on “greening” your electricity
And on greening your computing
You can monitor how much energy your devices are using with products such as this
Or this:
Those tips on monitoring devices came to us from the comments section of our original post. Plenty more good information where that came from that post. Check it out.
Saving energy is a good thing, but you can’t use the dollar savings as a reason to reduce your consumption. As we all reduce our consumption the Hydro Utilities such as Toronto Hydro apply for rate increases to make up for the loss in revenue due to conservation. So as we reduce consumption there really is no cost savings in the long run.
The so-called paradox that efficeincy gains in energy use lead to greater oveall use has come up. In my view, this is a false premise based on confusing two long term trends.
Firstly, overall energy usage has been steadly increasng, roughly at the rate of 7% per annum, and accunts for much of current levels of productivity and wealth.
Secondly, the normal engeneering and development process will refine products and improve their energy efficiency. The two processes are simultaneous and compatible.
I don’t think there is any paradox.
For myself, the energy cost difference beween a computer that draws 100 watts and one that draws 250 watts is negligible compared to capital cost differences and productivity differences. Do a calculation on this over a period of a year given intermittent use.
If you are going to relate this behavior to overall energy use and pollution levels, I would point out that any hope of change lies primarily in changing the sources of energy or refining current processes. Energy usage is too related to national wealth and productivity to expect much change through individual efforts.
One factor would be to radically rise the price of electricity. Right now it is very low.
Energy efficiency in the IT industry has been growing as an area of interest over the last 2-3 years. Chip makers forced by the confines of the laptop have introduced stepping technology that slows down the clock rate of the chip when there is low demand for its use, and speeds it up again when there is a load on the processor. This means it doesn’t get as hot, and heat is wasted electricity.
In the server arena, uesful work/watt has become a measurement criteria, with lots of interesting things there in terms of stepping down of processors. This has also forced the chip manufacturers to get more out of their processors while using the same or less electrical power. AMD and Intel both offer server grade processors with Wattage ratings as well as speed ratings, and as new processors come out, they get faster, but manage to consume the same or less power.
One interesting rule of thumb is that currently for every KW that a data centre consumes to power its servers, it consumes another KW in pwer to cool the data centre. Lots of inovation is going on in the area of cooling of data centres some of which involves turning off servers in low use times and having the cooling more closely linked to the server load so that it too stops working so hard when there is less to cool. Hopefully gone are the days of the 15C computer rooms.
These things can be significant when you have several hundred computers in a datacentre, but turning things off when they aren’t being used in an entire city would be even more significant.
Check out the power settings on your home PC, because it will slowly turn itself off as it sits idle, so you don’t have to remember to do it yourself.
I enjoy the show, and enjoy this concept of interactive broadcasting.
Thanks,
Jim
Savings due to efficiency of electrical appliances is a myth! At least in Canada, for most of the year. The fact is that, during the heating season (two thirds of the year), every watt-hour of energy you might save in reduced consumption in an appliance leads to an equal increase in your home/building heating consumption. If you heat with electricity, the two are exactly equal from financial and environmental impact points of view. If you heat with gas, there might be a small environmental benefit for better electrical efficiency depending on how your electricity is generated, but in most parts of the country it will still cost the same.
So I wonder if all this push for those hideous compact florescent bulbs will yield any overall benefit. Will it all result in just a costly heap of toxic waste?
But I do grant that, in hot weather, when you are using air conditioning, every watt-hour of consumption in an indoor appliance could cost you two or three. But since that happens in bright sunshine, you would at least have most of your lights off anyway, and besides, it’s a good time to turn off the computer and go jump in the lake.
I just received a Kill-A-Watt as a xmas gift. It’s really cool to see numbers from all the devices I use regularly. The 1L of water I boil for my morning coffee uses ~1500 watts during heating, and toasting my bagel uses 0.1KWH. I tested my mother’s xmas lights – her outdoor LED lights used 6 watts, while here indoor mini-incandescent lights used 43 watts. My mom’s first reaction was, “Don’t tell me how bad I am! I love those lights!”. I found this amusing, as I was only telling her the real numbers being used. It’s almost as if we need to allow ourselves to accept our current usage without judgement. If we can’t accept how we currently use power, we may not have much luck in changing it. But by knowing those numbers, I know to be much more relaxed about my LED lights that use 1-2 watts of power, and more vigilant about the 300 watts of kitchen lighting my wife leaves on. (It’s always easier to blame someone else
Happy Holidays,
Luke
I am equring a garget that can measure the currents used with in a period of time.