War On Standby: Do the figures actually stack up?
The War On Standby rumbles on: this week, courtesy of the UK government and "third sector" quangocracy, we heard yet again that gadgets left on standby suck vast, planet-wrecking, expensive amounts of energy from our electricity sockets. It's an idea which has gained a lot of traction over the years. Many Reg readers (and hacks …
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Re: CHP is a snare! @ Horsham sparky
Industry AC replies @Horsham Sparky
I'll be very surprised if they ever perfect the technology for domestic use. The enhanced complexity of microgen means reliability will always be notably lower than a straight boiler, and the durability of components like inverters is a known problem for all small scale generation. Judging by your moniker that's more your province than mine, but I know that we expect such components to last an average of ten years, and the fuel cell cores are even more problematic. Things are just as bad with non-fuel cell microgen technologies, albeit for different reasons.
Your assertion that the electricity involves no extra gas use ignores the fact that the household power demand is massively variable, and correlates only roughly with heating demand. So when my CH fires up on a winter morning for space or water heating, there's stuff all demand for electricity, because nobody's out of bed. Yes, you can export it, but that involves billing and metering complexities that cost more again, plus you need to factor the power station gas wasted by keeping turbines running as spinning reserve. A bit of intermittent microgen isn't going to save you any worthwhile amount of money. The feed in tariffs might move the numbers to break even or a modest profit (for those with no social conscience), but at standard rates a microgen boiler would take about forty years to achieve a payback or more..
I'd really, really like microgen to work, but I just don't see this happening any time soon. Most of the units on offer have been under development for more than a decade, and are on third or fourth generation pre-production runs, and they've still got these fundamental problems. Given that a modern condensing gas boiler is around 90% efficient, making the device five times as costly, three times as complex, and reducing its service life by a third to eke out as electricity perhaps a quarter of the remaining 10% energy makes no sense at all.
Re: CHP is a snare! @ Horsham sparky
Good points and well made :-)
Maybe I'm too much of an optimist and really want to see it working. oh well
Yep, you're right, inverters won't last forever, depends on the environmental conditions (they don't like heat), but I'd imagine there are clever ways to mitigate that (water cooling with a bit more overal efficiency as a fringe benny?). They can be made pretty reliable with well thought out and conservative design, it depends on the designer and the cost target.
I'm not so worried about the inverter issue as it can probably be resolved, however the fuel cell is the tougher target as the gas that's supplied isn't as clean as it could be and this can poison the cells if not filtered properly. if they can solve that one... :-)
Re: CHP is a snare! @ Horsham sparky
"The thing I like about the CHP fuel cell units is that you're not in fact using any more gas than you normally would to heat your home. You're getting some free* electricity in the bargain."
Not quite - look at the CHP efficiency as a central heating boiler alone. The outlet gasses of a modern 'A' rated condensing boiler are remarkably cool, barely warmer than body heat. Any electricity generated will be at the expense of heating efficiency.
Anything else would be running into the limits imposed by the first law of thermodynamics.
Overall, the only benefit of domestic CHP is that the reduction in heating efficiency is less than the energy wasted as heat at a power station. But remember that we are past peak oil and these use a dwindling resource as their fuel. In the long term, alternative sources of electricity will reduce the benefits of any domestic CHP systems.
Re: CHP is a snare! @ Horsham sparky
Industry AC again: I'm sure they can sort the various physical fouling and chemcal poisoning issues, albeit either adding cost, complexity or losing efficiency (or all three). The downsides of some of the other microgen and CHP solutions are more varied, and still require work as well. Sadly we've not identified any free lunches in micro gen or micro CHP.
The only "free lunch" is insulation. If you haven't got a foot of loft insulation (plus insulation over boarded areas), cavity wall insulation, DG, and draft control measures then get it done. Longer term we can go to even higher levels of insulation for existing buildings by using vacuum insulation panels or aerogels to do additional internal wall insulation (either as first fit on solid walls, or to replace existing dry lining on newer insulated cavity buildings) which would dramatically reduce heating energy use. There were some articles by Damon Hart Davis on El Reg a while back looking at things he'd done in this area - certainly such things are physically and technologically practical now, but won't be cost effective unless the makers and fitters can reduce the materials cost and standardise the retro-fit to keep those costs down. Do a search and read his articles - really good stuff (and maybe he could give us an update on how things have turned out?).
I've been trying to encourage my lot to take up these ideas on "ultra insulation", but in response to government policy we're more focused on filling out the dwindling numbers of wall cavities (increasingly the narrow gap, coastal, and otherwise difficult to do stuff), and working on solid wall properties (IMHO that should be CPO'd and demolished, because they're usually very poor in a multitude of other aspects).
Re: actually
This isn't really comparing like with like. The point of electrically "fired" heating is that it uses a heat pump to recover head from the environment. So 1KWe yields 3+ KWt at central-heating temperatures. In the overall context of huge efficiencies of scale and temperature in big gas turbines (running at 40%+ efficiency) this consumes less gas than burning it at home and getting 1KWt from it. So I think CHP is a bust, and would be a total nightmare a) to administer if we had a lot of it to integrate with electricity consuimption and b) for obvious reasons to convert to carbon-free energy when we get that sorted.
I'm fed up with gear without mechanical switches.
I'm damn well fed up with gear that doesn't have a mechanical on/off switch with a real air gap. One never knows whether the damn thing is actually off or on standby.
Worse still is the press-and-wait-5-seconds-for-something-to-happen switch. These devices are a cursed menace and make my blood pressure rise every time I have to wait for one. The original person who came up with the concept should be put in the stocks for a week and the public pelt him with equipment that uses them--it'd be an excellent use for old laptops.
It's so annoying that I've stared taking the battery out of my laptop so when I switch it off at the power point it stops within milliseconds not 5 seconds or much longer when windows wants to shut down. Problem solved--well for laptops anyway.
(Please don't bore me with the data loss issue, I use my machine in a way so I don't lose data that way. This delay isn't my problem, it's Microsoft's and those damn phone manufacturers who won't let you disconnect instantly. I used to have an old Nokia where I could press the battery clip-on button and quickly slide the battery a few mm then back which would disconnect the phone instantly, it was brilliant--when in a meeting with phone still on in my pocket I could turn it off before the end of the first ring. Can't do that these days now the batteries are inside. Classic example of a scientific step backward--or engineers with too little to do! The first company that brings out an instant-off cell phone will make a killing methinks.)
Re: I'm fed up with gear without mechanical switches.
"Worse still is the press-and-wait-5-seconds-for-something-to-happen switch."
You didn't own a TV before 1990 then, did you?
Re: I'm fed up with gear without mechanical switches.
"I use my machine in a way so I don't lose data that way"
You mean you don't turn it on? Windows spends an inordinate amount of time writing to the hard disk for various reasons - registry, logging and virtual memory are probably the top 3. How do you avoid using these while still running windows?
If you boot from an optical drive and run in memory then yes, you won't run the risk of damage to a file structure
@Nick Ryan -- Re: I'm fed up with gear without mechanical switches.
So what, you don't need that data unless you're a metadata freak. This is portable machine--not a desktop, and I couldn't give a stuff about metadata/config changes etc. being saved, restored or whether Windows has things to do--I've not enough time left in my life to wait for a fucked Windows which should have been designed originally to continually do these tasks in the background rather than at shut shutdown time (the most inconvenient of times).
People like you shouldn't be an apologist for Microsoft! That's why we've had to put up with such substandard shit for 20 years or more. If more people complained then the problem would have been fixed by now.
BTW, I don't use FAT32, NTFS usually doesn't cross-link. And I also use ERDNT which restores the previous day's automatic backup of the registry (ERDNT automatically stores the registry for the last 30 days but in the 3 years I've had this laptop I've never had to restore the registry because I've pulled the plug out).
Re: I'm fed up with gear without mechanical switches.
I think he means "I never run check disk so none of my files have ever been marked as corrupted"
@A.C.-- Re: I'm fed up with gear without mechanical switches.
I did--many of them--and they tuned off instantly when the power was turned off. You obviously weren't around back then.
@phuzz -- Re: I'm fed up with gear without mechanical switches.
Windows automatically runs CHKDSK when it considers the shut down hasn't been clean. This happens on FAT regularly, rarely on NTFS. NTFS usually fixes 'simple' dirty shutdowns--major crashes during activities such as power-out during multiple/long writes is another matter (read the NTFS spec).
It's not my practice to turn off the machine when I'm saving a file or when the disk activity light is on. No write--no problem.
BTW, despite Microsoft not fixing the problem for decades, they are very aware of it. I suggest you read the spec.--or what's been released so far--on ReFS (Resilient File System), the next generation file system for Windows ans Microsoft calls it. ReFS is specifically designed to finish writes BEFORE journal/index updating etc. This way, no data is lost during a power outage.
Re: I'm fed up with gear without mechanical switches.
Yeah, and I bet the helpstaff who have to rebuild your machine four times a year would say just the same thing, too.
Since when are IT management allowed in here? I thought this was the room for people with brains in their heads. Bloody neighborhood, I suppose.
Re: @A.C.-- I'm fed up with gear without mechanical switches.
by "turned off instantly", do you mean gradually faded to the little white dot, then turned off?
@soldinio -- Re: @A.C.-- I'm fed up with gear without mechanical switches.
If there's a little white dot then the EHT dot suppressor circuitry is not working. (The EHT smoothing capacitor is the CRT's glass (dielectric)).
White dots are caused when this EHT capacitor holds some resilient charge, the little white dot (caused by this charge) is deliberately suppressed to stop damage to the tube. Damage happens when the raster scanning collapses and there's still charge in the EHT system. The scanning electrons which are meant to cover the whole screen collapse into a small thin beam. This is too intense for the phosphor and damages it--hence the need for a suppressor circuit.
If you see a dot then the set is faulty.
Spot on
Standby power drain doom is for the most part a load of b0ll0x.
My mother in law still nags me that televisions use the same amount of electricity when on standby as when they are on. When I try to explain that they don't I get told off for thinking I know better than the government or 'the experts.'
*sigh*
Re: Spot on
Simple solution, just pretend to be one of 'the experts'
"Oh yeah, I had to do tonnes of tests on this sort of thing at work. They all were very conclusive"
Re: Spot on
Sounds like the sort of person it's worth creating a test rig for. Multimeters are cheap these days, and it'd be funny to see her face when the current required drops through the floor as you turn the device off.
Especially if immediately followed with "yes actually, I do know better."
Re: Spot on
If Richard's mothr-in-law is anything like my stepfather, that won't work. He'll just be told he must have done something wrong.
Re: Spot on
Yeah, no kidding. "Are you sure you know how to read that thing?"
Now, granted, my in-laws are damned fine people; in fact I do their IT support because their other son can't be arsed to do it without yelling at them for how stupid they are -- this from the guy who really doesn't see a need for silly nonsense like putting a firewall between a cable modem and a Windows XP box. Next time he touches their equipment for any reason, I'm going over to his house with a crowbar...
Re: Spot on
dotdavid, it does not work that way. People have a tendency to assign, label and rate others and their assumed level of expertise. They decide what you know and what you can do. Not you. Ever noticed how your average ignoramus superior person will not take your advice if it does not concern the fields he or she assigned you to – but will happily follow the exact same advice if you channel it through a person he perceives as a proper mouthpiece to emanate such information? This type of prejudice is a very interesting – if annoying – phenomenon. People do it because it allows their brains to act faster and with less thinking effort. I guess it is a reason why we invented degrees and certificates in the first place.
Sadly, it turns out you can be a nobel laureate in five different fields and your mother will still much rather believe in the advice of "experts" she picked up god knows where.
What everyone in the industry knows already...
We looked into this a few years back and actually seriously looked at it, IE we used these weird things called meters, put a device on, recorded the comsumption, used it a bit (if it was something load sensitive, recorded data, then put it to sleep and recorded the data again.
What we found pretty much confirmed what we thought, its a non issue. We had some devices well down in the tens of milliwatts range in standby. A few older transformer based bits of kit wernt so good but end of the day it amounts to a tiny tiny amount of power draw, 80 odd watts is just silly.
We stay at the pub we run during the week, the power bill there is so horrific we dont pay attention to it as in the grand scheme of things when your baseline draw is 9KWH peaking to 13KWh 1W makes no odds. However this means back home the fridge is kept company by the sky router, the Sky box, TV and AV amp, all in standby. We had an issue with the fridge a few months back wich resulted in it dying horribly (and stinking the house out) But in doing so it took its fuse out, giving us a baseline load figure of a whopping 4 watts, a little chasing (while I should have been shovelling the contents of the fridge into bin bags) showed that 2.5W of that was the Sky router leaving the TV (an older LG TFT), the Audio amp and the Sky box at 1.5W each. The thing is even that could be in the noise of the monitoring unit sat on the meter tails too.
We make equipment to run in veichles and we have to be very aware of power draw in these situations. We arent a world class company and we arent working with bleeding edge parts, but our standby currents are in the nA range, if we can do that I'm sure a multi biillion pound company like Lg, Sony or Netgear are pretty good at it by now.
Ric
Re: What everyone in the industry knows already...
80 odd watts is just silly.
Under 2mA at 5V used 24/7 will consume that, and some equipment does, so such figures aren't necessarily unreasonable.
What's really silly is people believing 80 watts per year is a large figure or significant in the scheme of what we otherwise use. The propagandists have got it into the public's head it is when it is not.
@richard 7 - - Re: What everyone in the industry knows already...
No disagreement here whatsoever. The point that concerns me is that there is some equipment without a separate mechanical off switch (i.e.: the only off switch is the electronic one). If for no other reason, they should be included for safety.
Re: What everyone in the industry knows already...
Watts per year? How does how long the device is in use for affect its power consumption in the slightest?
Re: What everyone in the industry knows already... @Jason B
Under 2mA at 5V used 24/7 will consume 87.6 watts in ONE YEAR or put another way leave it on for one hour and it will use a whopping 10mWHr or 0.0001kWH which your lecky meter can't even indicate.
the implications of the report are that standby kit is consuming 80 watts continuously ie 80 x 24 x 365 watt hours per year. A very different figure. As you note the greenwash propaganda machine in full ludicrous cry !
Re: What everyone in the industry knows already...
Where did you learn maths?
5V@2mA = 5V *0.002A = 10mW
assuming you meant Watt hours it would take 80 / 0.01 = 8000 hours or just under a year to get to 80Wh.. which would have cost you a grand total of.. *drum roll* 1.2p (15p per kWh)
p.s. sparky stuff is my day job ;-)
Waste is waste
Waste is waste and there is no point in paying for expensive electricity to heat your house when gas is a lot cheaper. However that being said I completely agree, we should target the big things first before we worry about the little things.
The whole standby vendetta is based on a few old inefficient appliances that used almost as much on standby as they did under full load. Regrettably a few tree-huggers have latched on to this and pushed it into the media and discredited the whole debate on efficiency.
Diminishing returns.
Sure, waste is waste, but the funny thing about waste is that attempting to clean up the waste CAN result in even more waste. Just as we inevitably dispense waste byproducts in the course of our daily lives (our bodies won't let us "hold it in"), so to will any form of community end up with some degree of debris. At some point, efforts to reduce this amount will only end up using as much (or even more) stuff than you're putting in, so at some point you have to just step back and say, "You know what? Wasters gonna waste" and just abandon what's left as inevitable.
Double Standards
I switch on the PS3 for a quick blast of MoH and get moaned at from the wife over its alleged power usage. Maybe she is trying to offset her own usuge with "leaving the shower to warm up" so the the bathroom resembles a sauna, then moves into the bedroom to power up the PC to listen to some Radio 1 (why cant she use the stereo!!) her hair straighteners and hairdrier which could also be used as a military jet engine.
Moral of the story is long hair blondes may look great but the power usage associated with them are astronomical.
Re: Double Standards
"Moral of the story is long hair blondes may look great but the power usage associated with them are astronomical."
Hey I'm a great looking long haired blonde but I never use a hairdrier or any other hair product except shampoo! Admitedly I probably have more balls and less tits than the kind of long haired blonde you're thinking about. ;)
Paris because she's blonde too and we've met.
Re: Double Standards
If you "have more balls and less tits than the kind of long haired blonde you're thinking about", you can't possibly be 'a blonde'. You must by definition be 'a blond'.
If you're going to use words from another language, at least get them right...
Re: Double Standards
So if someone were expecting a date with Paris Hilton and got you instead, would that be a blond bombshell?
Each to their own
I'm happy putting things on standby, turning lights off when I'm not using the, not using plastic bags, recycling and the like. I'm happy with the "Every little helps" school of thought. Same with petrol, trying to make my routes more efficient, drive more conservatively, ride my bike more often.
It won't save me enough to afford that gold plated ipad, but I'd rather have as much money in my pocket as I can, rather than handing it over willy and indeed nilly to somebody else.
Mine's the one with the reusable bag in the pocket.
Re: Each to their own
I like how you think spending an hour of your time, whilst saving five pence in your pocket, works out as a net profit for you. You must be a desktop Linux user.
Re: Each to their own
Where did I spend the hour of time? Walking out of a room I turn the lights off, this doesn't take an hour...it might take *you* an hour...
Re: Each to their own
And riding your bike gets you there quicker, I'm sure.
Re: Each to their own
My bike saves me 30 minutes on my journey, no waiting in traffic.
I remember buying one of those power monitors once. Now I should point out all of my electronic devices are on smart extension cords, circuit breakers, standby monitors etc.
I turn all my items off (standby really) and I was drawing something like 12w I think, really not much. I turn it on and the power used quickly shoots up to its normal level. After being told to turn everything off at the mains because my step dad is one of the "unplug everything" types I did so.
When I turned it all back on at the mains and started everything up, the power draw showing up on the monitor was almost double the normal startup draw, and remained that high for several minutes. I worked out that, if I were to unplug everything after using, and then plug it in to use it say, twice daily, i was actually wasting more power than I was leaving it all on standby.
Excellent work.
I used to go to sleep with the radio on, which would drive my dad up the wall. When I got my own telly, I got a drubbing down for leaving it on standby - not only was this a massive waste of his electricity, but I should have been unplugging it from the wall, too, lest a "lightning strike" cause it to explode.
Re: Excellent work.
"but I should have been unplugging it from the wall, too, lest a "lightning strike" cause it to explode"
You know that does actually happen, right? It's what surge protectors are meant to prevent, but unplugging things from the wall when you're not using them is a perfectly valid way to reduce the risk that they'll get fried by a power surge. It's much less common in the U.K. than some places, but I know people in certain places in the U.S. where the power supply is very unstable who absolutely have had thousands of dollars worth of stuff fried by power surges (and smarter people in those places who wouldn't dream of plugging in anything at all valuable unless it's behind a very good surge suppressor or UPS).
Your dad: not as dumb as you think he is.
Re: Excellent work.
What's really bad is when you have five UPSes from three manufacturers and, when plugged into mains, all of them show a 'Ground Fault' or similar indication and refuse to power up.
Re: Excellent work.
That sounds like you have a ground fault. That's not a UPS error, that's your wiring being wrong. You should have en electrition come and look at it. Preferably not the one who installed it.
Re: Excellent work.
A neighbour of mine witnessed a lightning stike to his home. Whole room lit up.
Caused 10's of thouisands of damage, surge came in and radiated out through all electrical wires. Including the aerial.
Goes to show that unplugging the the mains is not enough, you have to completely isolate your telly if you want it to survive lightning.
Oh, and those surge protectory, not a chance with that sort of power involved!
Re: Excellent work.
True, I kinda messed up on that one. Surge protectors are for other types of surges, as you say, there isn't one built that can isolate you from a direct lightning strike.
Re: Excellent work.
Sure there is! Quite cheap too -- all you need is a large air gap.
I can't make much sense of the boot note, should that be "*The paragraph quoted above does not refer to ceiling lights powered from 5A lighting circuits, but ones plugged into the wall: although these often use transformers too - for instance for low-voltage ceiling spotlights"
Might help to look at the linked to article which has a picture with the caption "Figure 22.1. An awful AC lamp-adaptor from IKEA – the adaptor uses nearly 10 W even when the lamp is switched off!"
I actually do switch things off
I'm one of those people who flicks the switches at the wall on a lot of things that don't need to be running all the time, something on stand-by uses more than something that is switched off, and that's all there is to it. My main driver is fire safety though rather than people wringing their hands and telling me to save the world.
I'd like to know the numbers for pointlessly plugged in chargers/etc as opposed to TVs which really don't use very much. Some of them get quite warm with no load whatsoever (same for any similar type of power pack) - where there's heat there's wasted energy.
Of course this is all undermined by the 2 kilowatt heater that sits in the garage running 24/7. Oops.
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