Stand down, standby
Standby modes on electrical appliances are being outlawed in the UK to prevent electricity wastage. Apparently, standby functions use 8 percent of all domestric electricity in the UK.
Could be tricky though, given that most appliances are manufactured offshore for the global market.
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July 18th, 2006 at 1:17 pm
It’s a useful thing to tackle as some appliances waste tens of watts on standby, and many don’t have a true “off” button. I know of at least one microwave oven that forces you to set the clock whenever you switch it on at the wall, which is a particularly annoying and useless design feature.
But — if people can’t use their remotes to (say) turn the stereo off, isn’t there a danger that many will just turn the volume down, consuming more power than standby mode would have?
Perhaps caps on standby power consumed would be more effective and easier to phase in (some manufacturers already produce appliances that are economical in standby mode).
July 18th, 2006 at 2:12 pm
Baz, does it make any sense to want appliances that waste power ‘efficiently’?
Those appliances just need some solid state memory to retain those handy Clock and other Settings values. It isn’t a big ask, and this is exactly the kind of easy solution to manage power demand rather than supply that we should be supporting. For my sins, I work for an appliance retailer and know that most of these products are on a six month or 12 month lifecycle; that is, new models meetings such requirements could come on to the market very quickly.
Given the short life-expectancy of today’s throwaway products, it wouldn’t be too long before most people are using them either
The only appliance we leave on in standby is the oven, as without setting it on rebooting, it won’t cook!
Bikemike
July 18th, 2006 at 2:45 pm
Bikemike, I think it makes sense for an appliance to waste 1 watt rather than 20. There’s a use of standby that you’re overlooking — being able to activate or deactivate an appliance with a remote. Turning on and off the air conditioner/TV/stereo/… gets soooo much harder when you have to get out of your seat, and you can bet that a lot of the time some people will just turn it down, using more power than an efficient standby.
But I agree that on most appliances it’s a pointless feature. If I have to load up my washing machine, an off/on switch is no extra hassle. Particularly odious is the PC with an ATX on/off-switch-that-isn’t: In this example of a computer wasting 78W in S1 standby (http://pcworld.co.nz/pcworld/pcw.nsf/hthard/2A8792679D4E48C6CC25717A0 016519C), it amounts to almost 2kWh per day, costing $130 per year on standby.
July 18th, 2006 at 3:03 pm
Baz,
AirCon / TV ? What are they for?
My stereo is 12 years old and though the CD drive started crapping out in the summer this year, it self-healed as the weather cooled. They don’t make them like they used to…
I had to take the casing off and hand-start the drive every time it failed. Do they make remote controls for that? It was such a pain getting out of my seat.
All my pc gear goes through a surge board which gets turned off when not in use; two fingers to always-on adsl
cheers
July 18th, 2006 at 3:30 pm
This comes down to economic reality for the manufacturers.
If that’s what people want, that’s what they will get. If not then any manufacturer is taking a risk by adding features like very low standby power if it involves more cost.
I would look more at hideous power wasters like reflective uplights.. 300WATTS to create a soft glow ewwww.
Simple resistive heaters.. ewwwwww.
Downlights, grossly inefficient as the reflective surfaces are usually just white paint or dull metal.
Domestic water heating cylinders… primitive thermostat control, run hot for Legionella protection but waste heat in radiation losses.
There are smart alternatives but they all cost money or worse still, one has to think about the problem.
July 18th, 2006 at 4:14 pm
Most consumers aren’t aware of standby power issues, hence the problem: only if there were big stickers saying “this uses 20W on standby which will cost you $100 after 3 years” might you see a change. Even then, many people would still go for the “false economy” option (landlords buying for rentals, people who can’t add, etc). It’s not really a manufacturing risk if it’s an inexpensive change that all your competitors have to do it.
>I would look more at hideous power wasters
Standby power was the focus of the article, but taken together the other changes could be more impressive:
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Lighting, set-top boxes, televisions, chargers, fridges, freezers, washing machines and computers were highlighted as wasteful products that must be redesigned to save power.
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> Downlights, grossly inefficient as the reflective surfaces are usually just white paint or dull metal.
Agreed, having a dozen bulbs embedded in the ceiling just to illuminate a room is wasteful. Does anybody like these apart from light bulb manufacturers?
July 19th, 2006 at 11:36 am
If there is no option to put an appliance into standby there will be a significant number of people who will just leave the thing *on*. I will put my TV on standby when I leave the room for a couple of minutes during an add break but force me to push the button on the set to turn it off and I’ll be less likely to bother. Same thing with my computer.
Far better to educate people about power use of appliances on standby. And to encourage manufacturers to make more efficient standbys like what currently happens with the overall energy efficiency star rating of products.
July 24th, 2006 at 3:02 am
The problem is as I see it is the daily line charges. As long as I am paying $2.00/day for the very first micro-watt I use, who gives a toss. (we need an opt out system with higher unit charge to incentivise power saving at this level.
Sleep and Standby modes on modern microcontroller chips (interupt or event driven) running realtime internal clocks use microwatts.. a supercapacitor (instant recharge) overcomes transformer/line losses.
We havent even started consumer pressure for design parameters to save that last cent possible. And we wont until we pay an equall amount for each AND every unit used.
When we have a truely online auction for units and a granular contract system then there will never be the ’societal’ (read: manufacturer meeting real needs) response to drive power consumption down.
But as long as we are paying for power that never reaches the meter and paying for infrastructure that we home consumers never use, there will never be a rational network.
We might waste a microwatt or two here and there, but the aveerage car uses 100+ kilowatts.. and we, for the large part, dont give a toss about micro-managing the energy variables wasted there.
Why should we try to drive a electricity toaster further when the best solution from an energy standpoint would be to toast using LPG directly and value our LPG (as an energy example) better.
July 24th, 2006 at 10:17 am
Blair
Most of the standby power won’t be making it to the internal circuitry: it’s usually linear power supplies getting nice and warm that uses the bulk of it. Your microwave oven could be using more power on standby than heating food.
I’m not sure where you’re going with the car analogy, as you seem to be confusing the peak power output of a petrol engine with the power consumption of electrical devices on standby. A more useful comparison might be a power station’s output versus a million households using standby power.
July 24th, 2006 at 12:18 pm
The issue with the computers is relevant to all of this. Consider how long it takes to shut down your basic Microstuffed box. It is not much better dropping a unix box. The last system that completely tolerated the sudden and complete shutdown that whacking the switch gives it was DOS.
Shutdown, and subsequent startup, of any of the more advanced OS’s is a major pain in the posterior.
To the extent that all devices are using computers, this becomes an issue in SW and Systems design.
ciao
BJ
July 25th, 2006 at 7:00 pm
Where is the common sense. Every city is awash with blazing advertising lights.Turn them off first,in fact turn off all the crap. Leave essential saftey lights for the city etc,minimize lights in shops etc. That would save a huge amount ,more than me turning off the standbt mode etc to the alarm clock and computer. If we were in really dire need we would cope without all the bright advertising lights,so why not do it now and save the energy while we are not at the mercy of mother nature or war..
marie hazledine-barber
July 25th, 2006 at 8:17 pm
Well said Marie!
July 27th, 2006 at 10:55 am
ereden ,
thanks for your comment. I wonder who packed the bags of common sense and left town. I often wonder as I look at the leaders of the country where the bag went. I sometimes feel we have become too precious and PC instead of just getting the job done. New Zealanders know the results required so why not do it. Just cast your mind back to the terrible time Auckland had with power failure all due to a main simple probably $2.00 shackle. Rusted old and bound for failure. Time we took care of common sense and the small things.
July 28th, 2006 at 1:20 pm
“Your microwave oven could be using more power on standby than heating food” - what, 700watts, bollox! It’d probably come close to catching fire if it did.
“Simple resistive heaters” - sorry, but my basic understanding of physics leads me to think that *any* electrical heater is 100% efficient (in electrical energy, not raw fuel terms) as the only significant way power is being converted is into heat, if you see what mean. (Burning a fuel directly is of course somewhat more efficient than using it to generate electricity for heating - although with a portion of our power being generated sustainably I’m not sure which is actually the best).
One should also bear in mind that many electronic circuits (like TV tubes) have a limited number of power cycles they can endure. Since they use energy to make, not having a standby setting could result in more net energy use.
I suspect that when this measure eventually gets implemented (and it will have to be by the EU or a global standards body, not the UK, who have no powers to set equipment standards) they will mandate maximum standby power for various types of equipment, which seems much more sensible.
July 28th, 2006 at 1:26 pm
Oh. Heat pumps. Yes.
Good idea in theory. However they are almost (as far as I know) always two way, running as aircon in summer. It’s questionable whether the power saved in winter outweighs the extra energy used in summer (against putting up with being hot, using shade and fans, etc).
July 28th, 2006 at 2:04 pm
richard_p
> “Your microwave oven could be using more power on standby than heating
> food� - what, 700watts, bollox!
But it’s only in use for a fraction of the time. If you use your microwave oven for 15 minutes a day, it’ll consume .175kWh. If it uses 10 watts on standby for the remaining 23.75 hours, that’s .2375kWh. Your standby power and microwave mileage will vary.
Regarding heat pumps, feedback from Consumer Magazine readers suggests that people use heat pumps to keep houses warmer in winter than they would with ‘normal’ electric heaters, so they don’t save much power (but do at least get warmer & healthier homes).
July 28th, 2006 at 5:06 pm
People, people….
I wouldn’t give people TOO hard a time about wanting to be comfortable.
The point isn’t to tell everyone they have to wear hair shirts and suck it in…. melting in the Summer or freezing in the winter. Proper insulation and glazing is worth three of whatever you use as your primary heating and cooling resource. New Zealand has to correct OTHER problems.
A heat pump may triple the efficiency of your electrical heating, but it costs somewhat in complexity and production. In other words, there are resources consumed in producing the compressor and motor and the rest.
A wood pellet fire is efficient and uses renewable resources as well. It also works just as efficiently when it gets cold. Most all of it is made in NZ as well… unlike the heat-pump.
respectfully
BJ
July 28th, 2006 at 11:53 pm
An environmentally-friendly architect friend once told me that double glazing is not worthwhile from an insulation standpoint, in NZ’s climate (or, more specifically, in Auckland’s climate I guess). Perhaps what he meant was that there are an awful lot of other insulation weak points in a typical NZ house (even a new one) which are much more cost-effective to deal with.
In general, I quite like the old stoical ethos, that originated in days when NZers had no great expectations of comfort in their homes. All those wooden houses built in the 20s and 30s, the wind whistles through the walls! but it won’t kill you. NZ is incredibly lucky to have such a temperate climate, it is surely one of the most humanly habitable places on earth (Ireland is close, very nice place to be during a Euro heat wave).
So stop grumbling and put on a jumper (er and perhaps gloves. Hands get cold sitting at the computer.)
July 29th, 2006 at 1:37 pm
Oh VERY good Alistair, THAT is exactly the attitude
Auckland… true.. not that much value in building anything good there.
Depends on the way you build in the first place. Me, I like the idea of using almost NO energy and still being comfortable. As it is right now, on a cold day I have am tempted to give names to the rivers of condensate off the windows.
Really, it is NOT hard to build a house that doesn’t take a lot of energy to keep comfortable. It is hard to persuade anyone in New Zealand about that. I mean, if the bathroom doesn’t have sliding glass doors onto a patio it’s hard to say that the house has “great indoor-outdoor flow”.
More to the point, in my little editors letter to the Dom Post I pointed out that the way we discourage people from owning the homes they live in makes it damned hard to get anyone to invest in making homes comfortable.
After all, the renter pays for the electricity, gas, wood or coal to heat the place.
respectfully
BJ
July 30th, 2006 at 10:53 am
Alistair
Perhaps your architect friend meant that it’s too expensive to replace existing windows with double glazing. A friend of mine building a house went for double glazing everywhere, IIRC the windows cost only 30% more than single glazing.
Like most ways of insulating a house it’s only an incremental cost if you do it when the house is built, but painful and expensive to retrofit to an existing building. I say this as someone who spent several weekends crawling around under our house fitting polystyrene to the floorboards and battling spiders.