"Always On" alternatives?

prof_braino

The trend is for devices to be always on. TV's and other appliances are instant on, meaning the are almost off, but still running so they start up faster. Anything with a wall wart may be switched off, but the wall wart continues to draw power.

When I was a kid, sometimes the electric meter would crawl so slowly it seemed stopped, until the fridge kicked on. Today, the meter whips along at 2 rpm at the lowest.

I can see the refrigerator and the phone need to left on, and maybe the cable modem. But most wall wart devices continue after the device is charged, and that reduces the life of the battery.

Is there anything to be done about everything else? I have most devices plugged into power strips, and can manually turn the whole strip off. But the wife and kids have trouble adjusting to switching the power strip on, waiting, then turning on the TV.

I'm thinking of putting times on some of the power strips, turn off when we're usually not around, and on just before we get home. Would the cost of the timer be less than the cost of leaving all the TV's and chargers plugged in and running?

Anybody else find this to be an issue worth addressing?

RDL2004

Yes, it's actually a pretty big issue. Go to Google and search on "vampire power"

Mike Green

A number of smarter manufacturers have gone to more sophisticated designs that switch into very low power mode when the appliance's power drain drops below a threshold. Apple's AA NiMH battery charger is one example of this where, once the battery is charged, the pilot light turns green, then will go off completely (and the trickle charge circuitry as well) after it's sat for an hour or so with the battery fully charged. The circuitry exists. It's a matter of will on the part of the manufacturers.

In the meantime, a time controlled outlet strip would be a good idea. You could use a latching relay or a SSR to minimize the leakage when it's off. A clock chip running off a battery would do for the timer. Some of them have a logic output that turns on at one stored time and turns off at another and that could trigger the SSR. You could always get fancy with a microcontroller if you want.

You do get into trouble with a lot of appliances that use the "always on" power to run their own clocks. You end up having to reset the clock every time you turn on the appliance.

pedward

LOL, guess how the timer on the outlet strip works? It's a motor driven from mains power.

Many devices don't like losing power because they have RTCs without battery backup; remember the flashing 12:00?

Switch your wall warts to switcher power supplies to reduce the parasitic draw.

These "off" devices are referred to as phantom loads.

bee_man

I stayed in a house on the Big Island of Hawaii that had a key at the front door. It cut the power to the entire house except the refrigerator when you turned that key. They kept their house keys on the same ring, so every time you left and locked the door you cut all the vampire current. It ran mostly on solar power with rain water collection for its fresh water, now thats green.

Tubular

The government here (in an effort to meet greenhouse targets) went around every house and installed one of these

I think they got the design of this mostly right. It has a dongle that mounts on top of the TV, that has an IR receiver to detect when you want to watch TV and switches on all slave AV equipment. It has a green led that flashes at you after 1/2/3 hours of IR inactivity, before switching everything off. And it has a single button on top which aborts it power down sequence, or gets it into as simple programming mode to set the idle power down delay to 1/2/3 hours. Simple enough to not want to rip it out which is the goal I guess.

Its easy enough to adapt to the required behavior, which in essence involves pressing the TV channel button twice rather than once to power up (once to turn on power, second time to select the channel once the TV has its power). I measured the standby current that it was saving - which surprised me at 20 watts total.

pacman

I picked up a couple of these http://www.altronics.com.au/index.asp?area=item&id=P8132 (well not those specific ones exactly...but you get the idea) for $20 each.

Got one on my main PC at home (so turning the PC off also kills the two monitors, the external HDD, the prop dev board powersupply, etc).

Possibly worth considering?

LoopyByteloose

I am trying to ponder what it is that is always on in my dwelling.

a. The router/gateway
b. The ADSL modem
c. The two computers in 'standby mode'.
d. The two monitors in 'standby mode'.
e. The TV box to convert cable to a computer monitor in 'standby mode'.
f. An electric hot plate in 'standby mode'.

I suppose I could lock it all out when I leave the premises. I can't use a PIR to automatically shut down as I have a dog that stays home.

During the hot months, the a/c and a fan run 24/7; during the coldest of winter, a heater and a fan run 24/7.

No refrigerator.

Since my room is on its own meter, I might just take a look and seem what the quiescent power consumption looks like. But I suspect that the real power waste in my rechargible notebook computer. I have read that the laptops and notebooks tend to consume 150% to 200% of what a conventional computer does due to waste going up as heat in the recharge and discharge cycles.

prof_braino

I measured the power using a kill-o-watt. Its not the most accurate, but it gives a ballpark estimate. I've decided for the time being, if the kill-o-watt measures zero amps and zero watts, that's good enough. In reality it could be 0.9 Watts, but I'm looking at bigger targets first.

The motor in the mechanical timer measures zero. The electronics in the the solid state timer run off a CR2032 battery and its lasted over a year so far, it also measures zero on the kill-o-watt.

Gizmos with a clock that flashes on power up are left on (clock radio, microwave, coffee pot) are going to be left running for now. The microwave draws 7 watts idle, the rest are fine.

Gizmos that have other issues at power up are also left on (cable modem, router, hub) are going to be left running. The Ethernet stuff draws a lot of power, but I'm going to leave that for now.

Some stuff just has to be left on, refrigerator, deep freeze, furnace. Don't want to risk messing with these just yet.

The first targets are the TV+DVD+Sound+Hub. These can run at 12 watt idle, or over 100 watts if I forget to turn off the sound system. I think I'm going to try a timer on these and see if there is a noticeable difference. If I kill the power by timer at 8:30 PM, and restart again at 7:30 AM, I might be able to save almost half the idle time power. The test is to see if there is any impact on the bill. The challenge will be keeping the kids from removing the timers until the data can be collected, which would mean three complete billing cycles.

PJAllen

Excerpted from a BS-gram, titled New Charge on Your Bill Beginning March 2013, included with my latest electric bill:

Because more customers are installing renewable energy systems such as solar and wind, and energy efficient measures such as CFLs and refrigerator recycling, [the electric co.] is selling less electricity, but fixed costs remain. [The electric co.] is allowed to implement a new charge to recover a portion of the fixed costs.

Then, the right hand not knowing that which the left hand doeth, on the flip-side was a blurb about how customers can go to [the electric co.] website for "tips on how to reduce your energy usage".