19 ms·

Yeah. The author is way off here. Another way you can quickly find big offenders is by using an infrared camera. I found various things in my house that are pu

by D13Fd 5y ago

Yeah. The author is way off here. Another way you can quickly find big offenders is by using an infrared camera. I found various things in my house that are putting off a ton of heat when doing nothing (and using electricity to do it). My 10-year-old speakers with a built-in amp, for example, absolutely glow on infrared even when sitting there inactive 98% of the time. Now they are on a switch.

edent 5y ago
Really depends where in the world you are. In the UK / EU there are rather strict rules on how much power devices can use in standby.
m_eiman 5y ago
While an IR camera is a good tool (and terribly fun to use!), not everyone has one. Almost everyone has another tool that can be nearly as efficient though: a hand. It's quite easy to use too: if something is warm when you touch it, it's burning through watts. If you expected it to be sleeping, it's either not sleeping or it's very bad at it. Don't forget the AC adapters, they can be worse than the devices they supply.
- sidewndr46 5y ago
  In a net heating environment, this is less of an issue than otherwise immediately obvious. A small idle electronic device making a consistent amount of heat just helps heat the house. If electricity is very expensive it would make sense to try and track down the offenders however.
  - m_eiman 5y ago
    Hopefully you have another heating system that's more efficient than direct electricity, though!
    - denton-scratch 5y ago
      How can any electric heating system be more "efficient" than an inefficient appliance? Inefficiency in an electrical appliance is nothing more than a measure of how good that appliance is at turning electricity into heat.
      - electroly 5y ago
        The others mentioned heat pumps but I'll mention that the person you replied to never said "electric" and is likely referring to gas heating.
      - markus92 5y ago
        A heat pump?
      - KiranRao0 5y ago
        A heat pump. Instead of using power to heat a room, you're using a (relatively) small amount of power to move heat from outside into the room.
      - deleted 5y ago
        [deleted]
      - jseutter 5y ago
        I had this same thought at one point and eventually learned of heat pumps. Heat pumps move heat from one spot to another, ie from outside your house to inside your house, or the other way. The point is, they move more energy than they consume. So that 1kwh of energy turned into heat by an inefficient electrical appliance could have instead been used to move 5kwh worth of heat into your home by a heat pump. Heat pumps are more efficient than they used to be (at some point the outside air is too cold for them to work efficiently), so the cold climate where I'm from is just now starting to see them included in new homes.
        denton-scratch 5y ago
        Yes, I've considered getting a heat pump; for one reason and another, I can't. It doesn't feel right to talk about the "efficiency" of a heat pump system; talk of "1W in gets you 3W out" isn't right, because you didn't magic those 3W out of thin air. It's more like "4W in gets you 4W out". It seems wrong to say that a heat pump system is "400% efficient". I thought efficiency was a measure of how much of the work[0] going into a machine is transformed into the intended output work. I suppose you could say that this heat delivery machine is inefficient if a lot of the input work is expended on producing torque, or raising heavy stuff. But even that eventually turns into heat; just in the wrong place. [0] I hope I'm using "work" and "machine" in the technical sense, so that "work" means displacement against a force, and a "machine" is any device for converting work from one form to another. Effiency is well-defined for that kind of machine: it's just the ratio of work in to work out, the output being what you want; so "efficiency" intrinsically depends on what your intentions are for your machine. .
  - PaulHoule 5y ago
    In the summer though heating the house is a bad thing. Either you are making your house hotter or you're making the air conditioner work harder to remove it.
  - londons_explore 5y ago
    In most of the world electrical heat is about 3x as expensive as the next cheapest heating (gas, coal, oil, heat pump or wood)
- esaym 5y ago
  Even better, just go to a pawn shop or ebay and get a used current clamp meter for cheap. Then pull the cover off of your circuit breaker box in your house and check the current draw on each and every wire.
- chrisBob 5y ago
  My local library has them available to check out for free! The payback period for buying a Flir camera to do your own energy audit is likely long, but checking one out is pretty reasonable.
- giantrobot 5y ago
  > Almost everyone has another tool that can be nearly as efficient though: a hand. I've found the IR camera works much better than my hand for things like switching power supplies. They'll be glowing in IR while being cool to the touch even when no device is plugged into them. While each might not be a ton of power I tended to just leave them plugged in all the time.
quietbritishjim 5y ago
Speakers are notoriously a specific case where power actually does get used in standby, so it doesn't really contradict the original article. For instance, an old BBC News article (not the one published today that probably triggered this submission) listed "TV on standby" as using lots of power but was actually including various peripherals including powered on external speakers. I would expect turning those off and leaving the TV on would use almost no power. If, as parent comment says, even the TV/monitor is using significant power, then that's a lot more interesting.
- dspillett 5y ago
  > I would expect turning those off and leaving the TV on would use almost no power That is going to vary a lot depending on the TV. I suspect a lot of modern "smart" TVs consume a measurable amount when idle.
  - maccard 5y ago
    Idle or in standby? EU regulations state the maximum standby power is 0.5w.
    - madaxe_again 5y ago
      You do, however, typically need to set “low power standby” or whatever in the options somewhere - it’s usually not enabled by default - the default is usually to turn the screen off but leave everything else running. Mine drew about 5W in “normal” standby, and is immeasurably low (from our household inverters - I live off grid) in low power standby. It takes about 10 seconds to boot - no big deal.
      - nsteel 5y ago
        I believe the low power mode is required (by UK law, at least) to be enabled by default. It's pointless otherwise as almost nobody will go and enable that mode.
      - scarby2 5y ago
abandonliberty 5y ago
I have electrical heating, so until the summer there's no such thing as wasted electricity. Many people struggle to understand this concept. In some climates and energy grids, switching from things like incandescent to LED causes a greater environmental impact. It may shift (and may have already) as LED production gets more efficient.
- david422 5y ago
  > In some climates and energy grids, switching from things like incandescent to LED causes a greater environmental impact How would that be the case?
  - jhugo 5y ago
    5x 100W light bulbs is 0.5kW of heat output which your heating system doesn't need to supply. Switch to LED and your heating system will need to supply that extra 0.5kW. In a climate where you are almost always running heating, this makes the benefit of switching to LED much smaller, and considering that they are much less environmentally friendly to produce, it may even tip the scale the other way.
    - gregable 5y ago
      Yes, but. There are few places that need heating 100% of the year and fewer people living there. During the non-heating hours/days, that's just waste heat. Depending on where the bulbs are located, they may be emitting into a ceiling cavity that exits the building's envelope more quickly than the location of the heating coil. Some bulbs are actually outside the building. And of course, the heating system can supply 0.5kW for less than 0.5kW of power with heat pumps or (net including generation and transmission) natural gas.
    - post-it 5y ago
      Resistive electrical heating is typically the most expensive heating option available, at least here in Canada. A heat pump uses much less power to provide the same amount of heat, and fossil fuel heating (gas in the west, oil in the east) is often much less expensive than electric.
jahewson 5y ago
Your amp isn’t “doing nothing” it’s just… on. Just because you’re not feeding it a signal doesn’t mean it’s not amplifying.
outworlder 5y ago
I've thought about buying an infrared camera, but I've found them to be terribly expensive. Not in scientific terms as they are precision instruments, but in 'I have some money to spend on amazon but this thing has high three figures so I'll buy something else'. Specifically talking about FLIR and the direct competitor I forgot the name. Are there any affordable cameras that are not completely trash? Low resolution is ok.
- D13Fd 5y ago
  Mine is an HTI-19 320 x 240 resolution one that was $233 on Amazon. It's not cheap, but I've certainly saved more than that in electricity from problems it identified in the 2.5 years since I bought it. It works just fine. An infrared camera is great for tracking down and fixing insulation problems in your house, if you own a home. And fixing insulation issues really brings down your heating/cooling bills. If you don't own a home the value proposition is a lot worse, but $200 or so still isn't bad for something that amounts to a fun toy. EDIT: Sorry, it was $380 before Amazon points. I should have clicked into the invoice.
- gehwartzen 5y ago
  The FLIR One or Pro are in the $220-300 range if I remember correctly. They attach to your iphone and use that as the screen an maybe for some processing. In any case it works pretty well for most personal applications you might run across.
- corobo 5y ago
  Hypothetically speaking you could buy one, find the hot spots, send it back to Amazon. Morally it’s not exactly solid but at least you’re not standing on the backs of the poor to be a billionaire and all that

by D13Fd 5y ago

edent 5y ago

Really depends where in the world you are. In the UK / EU there are rather strict rules on how much power devices can use in standby.

m_eiman 5y ago

While an IR camera is a good tool (and terribly fun to use!), not everyone has one. Almost everyone has another tool that can be nearly as efficient though: a hand. It's quite easy to use too: if something is warm when you touch it, it's burning through watts. If you expected it to be sleeping, it's either not sleeping or it's very bad at it. Don't forget the AC adapters, they can be worse than the devices they supply.

sidewndr46 5y ago
In a net heating environment, this is less of an issue than otherwise immediately obvious. A small idle electronic device making a consistent amount of heat just helps heat the house. If electricity is very expensive it would make sense to try and track down the offenders however.
- m_eiman 5y ago
  Hopefully you have another heating system that's more efficient than direct electricity, though!
  - denton-scratch 5y ago
    How can any electric heating system be more "efficient" than an inefficient appliance? Inefficiency in an electrical appliance is nothing more than a measure of how good that appliance is at turning electricity into heat.
    - electroly 5y ago
      The others mentioned heat pumps but I'll mention that the person you replied to never said "electric" and is likely referring to gas heating.
    - markus92 5y ago
      A heat pump?
    - KiranRao0 5y ago
      A heat pump. Instead of using power to heat a room, you're using a (relatively) small amount of power to move heat from outside into the room.
    - deleted 5y ago
      [deleted]
    - jseutter 5y ago
      I had this same thought at one point and eventually learned of heat pumps. Heat pumps move heat from one spot to another, ie from outside your house to inside your house, or the other way. The point is, they move more energy than they consume. So that 1kwh of energy turned into heat by an inefficient electrical appliance could have instead been used to move 5kwh worth of heat into your home by a heat pump. Heat pumps are more efficient than they used to be (at some point the outside air is too cold for them to work efficiently), so the cold climate where I'm from is just now starting to see them included in new homes.
      - denton-scratch 5y ago
        Yes, I've considered getting a heat pump; for one reason and another, I can't. It doesn't feel right to talk about the "efficiency" of a heat pump system; talk of "1W in gets you 3W out" isn't right, because you didn't magic those 3W out of thin air. It's more like "4W in gets you 4W out". It seems wrong to say that a heat pump system is "400% efficient". I thought efficiency was a measure of how much of the work[0] going into a machine is transformed into the intended output work. I suppose you could say that this heat delivery machine is inefficient if a lot of the input work is expended on producing torque, or raising heavy stuff. But even that eventually turns into heat; just in the wrong place. [0] I hope I'm using "work" and "machine" in the technical sense, so that "work" means displacement against a force, and a "machine" is any device for converting work from one form to another. Effiency is well-defined for that kind of machine: it's just the ratio of work in to work out, the output being what you want; so "efficiency" intrinsically depends on what your intentions are for your machine. .
- PaulHoule 5y ago
  In the summer though heating the house is a bad thing. Either you are making your house hotter or you're making the air conditioner work harder to remove it.
- londons_explore 5y ago
  In most of the world electrical heat is about 3x as expensive as the next cheapest heating (gas, coal, oil, heat pump or wood)
esaym 5y ago
Even better, just go to a pawn shop or ebay and get a used current clamp meter for cheap. Then pull the cover off of your circuit breaker box in your house and check the current draw on each and every wire.
chrisBob 5y ago
My local library has them available to check out for free! The payback period for buying a Flir camera to do your own energy audit is likely long, but checking one out is pretty reasonable.
giantrobot 5y ago
> Almost everyone has another tool that can be nearly as efficient though: a hand. I've found the IR camera works much better than my hand for things like switching power supplies. They'll be glowing in IR while being cool to the touch even when no device is plugged into them. While each might not be a ton of power I tended to just leave them plugged in all the time.

quietbritishjim 5y ago

Speakers are notoriously a specific case where power actually does get used in standby, so it doesn't really contradict the original article. For instance, an old BBC News article (not the one published today that probably triggered this submission) listed "TV on standby" as using lots of power but was actually including various peripherals including powered on external speakers. I would expect turning those off and leaving the TV on would use almost no power. If, as parent comment says, even the TV/monitor is using significant power, then that's a lot more interesting.

dspillett 5y ago
> I would expect turning those off and leaving the TV on would use almost no power That is going to vary a lot depending on the TV. I suspect a lot of modern "smart" TVs consume a measurable amount when idle.
- maccard 5y ago
  Idle or in standby? EU regulations state the maximum standby power is 0.5w.
  - madaxe_again 5y ago
    You do, however, typically need to set “low power standby” or whatever in the options somewhere - it’s usually not enabled by default - the default is usually to turn the screen off but leave everything else running. Mine drew about 5W in “normal” standby, and is immeasurably low (from our household inverters - I live off grid) in low power standby. It takes about 10 seconds to boot - no big deal.
    - nsteel 5y ago
      I believe the low power mode is required (by UK law, at least) to be enabled by default. It's pointless otherwise as almost nobody will go and enable that mode.
    - scarby2 5y ago

abandonliberty 5y ago

I have electrical heating, so until the summer there's no such thing as wasted electricity. Many people struggle to understand this concept. In some climates and energy grids, switching from things like incandescent to LED causes a greater environmental impact. It may shift (and may have already) as LED production gets more efficient.

david422 5y ago
> In some climates and energy grids, switching from things like incandescent to LED causes a greater environmental impact How would that be the case?
- jhugo 5y ago
  5x 100W light bulbs is 0.5kW of heat output which your heating system doesn't need to supply. Switch to LED and your heating system will need to supply that extra 0.5kW. In a climate where you are almost always running heating, this makes the benefit of switching to LED much smaller, and considering that they are much less environmentally friendly to produce, it may even tip the scale the other way.
  - gregable 5y ago
    Yes, but. There are few places that need heating 100% of the year and fewer people living there. During the non-heating hours/days, that's just waste heat. Depending on where the bulbs are located, they may be emitting into a ceiling cavity that exits the building's envelope more quickly than the location of the heating coil. Some bulbs are actually outside the building. And of course, the heating system can supply 0.5kW for less than 0.5kW of power with heat pumps or (net including generation and transmission) natural gas.
  - post-it 5y ago
    Resistive electrical heating is typically the most expensive heating option available, at least here in Canada. A heat pump uses much less power to provide the same amount of heat, and fossil fuel heating (gas in the west, oil in the east) is often much less expensive than electric.

jahewson 5y ago

Your amp isn’t “doing nothing” it’s just… on. Just because you’re not feeding it a signal doesn’t mean it’s not amplifying.

outworlder 5y ago

I've thought about buying an infrared camera, but I've found them to be terribly expensive. Not in scientific terms as they are precision instruments, but in 'I have some money to spend on amazon but this thing has high three figures so I'll buy something else'. Specifically talking about FLIR and the direct competitor I forgot the name. Are there any affordable cameras that are not completely trash? Low resolution is ok.

D13Fd 5y ago
Mine is an HTI-19 320 x 240 resolution one that was $233 on Amazon. It's not cheap, but I've certainly saved more than that in electricity from problems it identified in the 2.5 years since I bought it. It works just fine. An infrared camera is great for tracking down and fixing insulation problems in your house, if you own a home. And fixing insulation issues really brings down your heating/cooling bills. If you don't own a home the value proposition is a lot worse, but $200 or so still isn't bad for something that amounts to a fun toy. EDIT: Sorry, it was $380 before Amazon points. I should have clicked into the invoice.
gehwartzen 5y ago
The FLIR One or Pro are in the $220-300 range if I remember correctly. They attach to your iphone and use that as the screen an maybe for some processing. In any case it works pretty well for most personal applications you might run across.
corobo 5y ago
Hypothetically speaking you could buy one, find the hot spots, send it back to Amazon. Morally it’s not exactly solid but at least you’re not standing on the backs of the poor to be a billionaire and all that