My attempt at being environmentally friendly, day 1
I had been meaning to check it out for a while, so I finally watched An Inconvenient Truth (on my Zune! great for a coast to coast flight) on the way back to Michigan before Christmas. I would definitely recommend watching it, then doing some research on your own afterwards. There is a Wikipedia article with some good references for further information as well.
ClimateCrisis.net has an interesting calculator to determine how much CO2 emissions you produce annually (I’m estimated at about 10.2 tons of CO2 per year, mostly due to flying every month). In an attempt to lower my impact on the environment, I’ve dug out my P3 Kill-A-Watt I bought last year after reading about it on Coding Horror.
The $25 Kill-A-Watt is a sweet little device that you can use to measure the energy consumption of various things in your house. You just plug this into your wall first, then your appliance into it. It shows current volts, amps, watts, kWh, etc.
I went on an energy census of my various electrical devices, and found some interesting things:
Appliances
* Mini refrigerator (average): 20W
* Coffee grinder: 67W
* Toaster oven: 1470W
Fans
* Bedroom tower fan: 25W low, 38W high
* Living room tower fan: 30W low, 37W high, 37W high+oscillation
Lighting
* Bedroom tower light: 140W, 21W w/ CFL
* Bedroom desk lamp: 90W, 13W w/ CFL
* CPU desk lamp: 20W
* Living room tower light: 165W low, 300W high
* Bathroom mirror (3x): 60W, 14W w/ CFL
* Dome lights (4x): 60W, 14W w/ CFL
* Kitchen, living room track lights (6x): 60W, 14W w/ CFL
Misc
* Zune charging w/ iPod adapter: 2W
* Jabra (headset) charging: 0W
* MotoQ (cellphone) charging: 2W
* Alarm clock: 0W
Electronics
* Main computer: 190W
* Shuttle (Media Center) computer: 140W
* 17″ LCD: 45W
* 21″ LCD: 40W
* Comcast DVR: 43W off, recording, or playing
* Xbox 360: 275W @ dashboard, +4W if a 1-4 wireless controllers active
* TV: 87W
* Amp: 72W idle or playing content
* Playstation 2: 29W
Interesting stuff! I was surprised that my 21″ LCD took less energy than the 17″ LCD. The 17″ LCD is older (a year or two), and is also running VGA (instead of DVI on the 21″). Would that be why?
There are other devices that I didn’t quite measure that I’m sure account for a good percentage lot of my electrical usage (refrigerators, microwave, washer, dryer, dish washer) as well. Here’s a good estimator for those appliances.
Tomorrow’s adventure is converting my apartment to Compact Fluorescent Lights (CFLs).
Thankfully you aren’t a complete hippie yet and drive a 16mpg car like the rest of us fine Americans.
For the CFLs, just personal lighting or also your apartment company’s? Did you know that CFLs are almost 30 years old but companies like Walmart and trying to really push suppliers and consumers towards getting together?
Keep us posted the energy experiments, thx!
Yes, my car is my Achilles heel. I won’t be giving up on that soon, but I’m thinking about contributing to a CO2 offset program such as nativeenergy.com.
I replaced all of the CFLs in my own apartment. It really got me thinking though, how cool it would be if a lot of the big places like apartments, stores, etc were able to convert all of their bulbs to CFLs as their lights are on a lot more than mine.
Nic, I happened to blog about this the same day as you, although I’ve been data-gathering for a little while now.
http://www.kebabshopblues.co.uk/2007/01/03/outrageous-electricity-consumption/
My surprise was how much power devices (especially computers) used when they were ‘Off’. I’d be interested if you could replicate my findings.
I’m not so worried about the power my fridge/freezer uses… as it happens, my own F/F appears to use less power when _it_ is useful all year round. In contrast, I found out that if I left two computers off, but plugged in, the wasted energy would be more than the useful F/F in a year.
Now that’s an inconvenient truth for computer users.
Nij
P.S. I’m not at all surprised your toaster oven uses that sort of level of energy, but how often do you use it? I bet your computers use more power in a year, yet eating is definitely more important
Nij, welcome!
It looks like I got some similar results to you. I agree with you that computers are some of the biggest users of energy, especially as I never shut my computers off. An unfortunate side-effect of me being 1) highly computer dependent and 2) wanting to never have a ‘delay’ when I need to check the computer.
Yeah, the toaster oven is not always on
However, I was just interested to see how much power it uses when it is on — 1500W is huge compared to everything else. It’s only on for minutes at a time, a dozen times a month — so probably not a big contributor to my energy bill.
Thanks for stopping by!