What follows is a journey of discovery, and will result in at least one project oriented how-to article (as promised so long ago).
Effecting change in your everyday household energy menu is tough if you don’t know what you’re currently using. With that in mind, let me introduce:
The Kill-a-watt
The kill-a-watt is a handy little device that can be picked up for as little as $30. There are more sophisticated devices on the market, but this one is a quick, cheap energy sleuth and is easily found on the internet, and in brick&mortar stores.
I borrowed mine from a good friend who uses it to gauge the energy usage of his server farms.
The units operation is simple. Just plug it in to an avaliable wall socket, and plug the device you want to sleuth into the 3-prong plug on the unit’s face.
You can easily discern the power draw from constant rate devices like lamps, electric heaters and fans using the “watt” setting. For instance, I discovered that the lamp in my living room pulls 65 watts. The compact fluorescent light-bulb (CFL) I purchased to replace it draws only 12 watts and is visually brighter. Other CFL’s in use in my apartment draw as little as 5 watts, although they are not quite as bright.
A plan
This investigation has revealed to me that the 4 lightbulbs I use the most in my house are drawing the most power. This is kind of ironic considering how I purchased a 5-pack of CFL’s from home depot in the hope of reducing my energy bills. Beginning march 1, I am going to replace the 5 remaining incandescents in my household with CFL bulbs. At the end of the month, I will reveal what impact (if any) that these bulbs made on my monthly power consumption.
a quick calculation reveals that replacing each 65-watt bulb with a 12-watt equivalent will use 19% of the power of my current bulbs. I am planning on spending about $2 per bulb for replacements
The Star
Another comparison I wanted to make was between the television technologies in my apartment. I have a sanyo TV in the living room which draws between 45 and 70 watts, depending on the volume of the television, and the picture on-screen. Investigating the LCD television in my bedroom, I discovered that it draws a mere 20 watts and is just as bright. The bedroom tv (A Cornea tv/monitor) is based on a relatively old version of LCD technology, being manufactured in 2001, and I would expect a modern LCD to draw even less power. However, sleuthing my desktop monitor (a 20″ Spectre LCD), reveals a steady power draw of 54 watts (1 watt in standby mode). I am surprised that my LCD monitor draws approximately the same power as my CRT-based tv!
LCD tvs and monitors main power draw is due to the cold-cathode tubes (usually 4) behind the transparent screen. The power requirements should be theoretically less than that of a CRT display. Further investigation is needed to determine whether LCD display manufacturers are not taking advantage of possible energy savings.
This brings me to my next topic. New energy star specifications have been unveiled earlier this year to indicate to consumers which computers are energy efficient in their class. C|net has an easy-to-read explanation of the new requirements for the energy star. Note that there is currently no energy star available to the server class of computers. (This means you, google.)
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