Ed,
I spent a lot of time over the past few years looking at this exact
problem. It becomes interesting if your power company charges tiered
rates and baseline is under a dime, while 300% and over is nearly $0.50.
The government's EnergyStar program did not initially look at standby
power, but about a decade ago they got pretty heavily involved. My
half-watt standby number came from the EnergyStar web site, and is
typical of a good-sized LED television. Same is true of DVD players,
video games, etc. -- they use almost no power when the only thing
they're doing is waiting for someone to pick up a remote control. Under
1/2 watt is pretty typical on anything new.
At a half-watt, the electronic device is cold -- not much of a fire hazard.
The sum of all of the standby loads can be significant if you have lots
of older stuff, or it can be pretty low. Twenty half-watt devices 24
hours/day is 7 kilowatt hours a month.
By the way, if you're worried about fire hazards, replace all your
incandescent light bulbs with LED bulbs -- especially the ones in
closets and storage spaces.
If you want to know where your power dollars go, eBay and most home
improvement stores (Orange or Blue) have a gadget called a Kill-A-Watt.
You can actually measure.
73 -- Lynn
P.S. when energy rates soared several years ago, I measured our (old)
refrigerator with a Kill-A-Watt and found that the energy savings alone
would pay for a new one in about a year.
On 10/15/2014 9:29 AM, Edward R Cole wrote:
Lynn,
That was a guess and probably way too high. I have 3-year old 46-inch
LED flat-screen. But also a home theater receiver rated to 125w audio
and two DVD drives, a VCR and satellite receiver. So all the remote
control power supplies do add up - to what? I do not know - haven't
measured the total load.
But since the TV is on from 5pm-10pm and off the rest of the day it
seems there would be some savings by disconnecting the ac power. We
have a six outlet strip which makes that simple. It does reduce fire
hazard.
On the other hand I keep my Astron station 12v supply on full time
which supplies the OCXO, so I do not have any delay waiting for it to
stabilize. I have my ham gear on more frequently than the TV.
We make a pot of coffee (fresh ground) in the morning and turn-off the
maker after it finishes. Coffee pot draws quite big load keeping
water and coffee pot hot. And that only ruins the coffee. We just
reheat a cup in the microwave when we want hot coffee. Do we save any
power this way?? But the coffee tastes better :-)
73, Ed
______________________________________________________________
Elecraft mailing list
Home: http://mailman.qth.net/mailman/listinfo/elecraft
Help: http://mailman.qth.net/mmfaq.htm
Post: mailto:[email protected]
This list hosted by: http://www.qsl.net
Please help support this email list: http://www.qsl.net/donate.html
Message delivered to [email protected]
