This cannot be a good sign for the energy monitor business, especially the middle tier, notably Blueline PowerCost Monitor and The Energy Detective, but also CurrentCost Envi and others, even WattVision. All are priced at a point that is sufficiently high to make you think twice, and have a difficult task of demonstrating that the savings you’ll get will be enough to warrant the cost.

Higher-end models such as the eMonitor make a lot of sense, because what I saw was that the people buying them either had massive houses, or lived in places where electricity prices were high (e.g. Hawaii). I would not be surprised if these folks were getting bills around $500 to $1,000 per month. Not only did these customers have more money, they had a harder problem to identify, but easier to solve — one pool pump turned off for a few hours, or one AC unit turned down a little could easily justify the much higher cost. This same math doesn’t work for normal folks whose electricity bill is just one more $130/month bill.

Back in those heady days of 2008 when people gave a damn about things past the end of their nose (like energy conservation, climate change, etc.), businesses arose to support the novel idea that you should be able to keep track of how much energy you used. And Google and MS both offered services that supported these businesses by storing power data and providing a web interface.

But the start was rocky.

I blame The Energy Detective, or TED. I had the distinct displeasure of working with this company for some time, and have really pretty much nothing good to say about them. At first, it seemed great. But it turned out to be terrible. They created a product that was ridiculously and needlessly complicated, turned out to be very difficult to install, required an electrician and a network engineer, had poor quality control, and which is fickle at best, and for many people (including me) broke or failed repeatedly. Add to that several people in the support department, and the company’s CEO who were arrogant, dismissive and repeatedly pissed off customers with horrible service. Oh, and lets not forget the time in Fall of 2009 where they reported a short delay in shipment, which was only resolved about 5 months later. How to make people angry, 101.

TED 5000 was the first product that connected to Google PowerMeter, and in the Google support forums, people became angry at Google (whose service was free) when the TED 5000 failed in any of the numerous ways it could fail. Reports from Google, and even from TED competitors were that the outpouring of disgust against Google due to TED failures made Google reluctant to support any other products. Eventually they opened their API, but the TED had left a sour taste in everybody’s mouths.

So I blame Energy Inc, and TED 5000 for killing Google PowerMeter.

If the TED 5000 experience were not bad enough, Google PowerMeter also provided an interface to utilities who could upload customer data. Few joined, and reports were that many of those that did had spotty support. Utility companies get runner up for this dubious honor.

As Google found out, no good deed goes unpunished. It was noble of them. If only simpler and more elegant products like Wattvision had been the first to go, the world may have been a different place — their product sells in the same price range, does not require an electrician, and has a far better (i.e. simpler) design than TED, or even the venerable PowerCost Monitor. Of all that I tried (and I tried them all), only Wattvision “just worked”, and still does. I would think that there’s a way to make it much less expensive (remove the WiFi chip!!) and more useful (add a simple display). But chances are, the game is up.

I still find it odd to think that electricity (and other household energy) monitoring is not just something every house has. I still save tons of money every month, about $100/month at current rates (paying for all of my monitors many times over). We did this simply by finding small loads that I was able to eliminate. Until we make energy something that people can feel, nothing will happen. This is evident every time gas prices go up because paying for gas is something you do enough to know it costs something. Not so for electricity, and mostly not so for heating energy — they are hidden.

It will happen eventually, but not now. Our infrastructure is in terrible shape. Our will to take action appears to be in even worse shape.

Surprisingly Close To Incandescent

There’s some progress, but we’re still not quite there. Home Depot is selling a Philips LED light bulb: same brightness as a 60W incandescent bulb (in other words, dim), same shape as standard A19 bulb, same color temperature and color rendering index, and dimmable, uses 12W, and lasts for 25,000 hours — Cost: $40.

A comparable CFL, (although not dimmable) costs about $1.50 and uses 13W and lasts 8,000 hours.

A comparable incandescent costs around $1 and uses 60W and lasts about 1,000 hours.

Some math. Compared to incandescent:

• CFL and LED both use about 1/5th as much electricity
• LED lasts 25x longer, CFL lasts 8x longer

So let’s think about lifetime cost. There are two parts to this: store price and electricity price. Assuming the current average price of electricity in the US stays about $0.10/kWh we can calculate cost per 1000 hours (kh). 60W is .06kW.

• Inc: ($1.00/1kh) + (0.060kW * 1000h * $0.10/kWh) == $1.00/kh + $6.00/kh == $7.00/kh
• LED: ($40./25kh) + (0.012kW * 1000h * $0.10/kWh) == $1.60/kh + $1.20/kh == $2.80/kh
• CFL: ($1.25/8kh) + (0.013kW * 1000h * $0.10/kWh) == $0.16/kh + $1.30/kh == $1.46/kh

So, this Philips LED would cost less (a lot) than the incandescent it replaces. And the CFL is still big winner on price.

CFL is by far the least expensive and uses a fraction of the electricity.

But let’s get real. CFL ain’t happening. And there are reasons LED won’t, either, even though both are far less expensive than incandescent.

Getting Real

But of course, there’s way more to this. Here’s the way things work in real life.

Real People Don’t Do Math

Unit pricing ($/ounce, or something) works when you’re deciding to buy the small or large tube of toothpaste. But there’s no “dollars per thousand hours” unit pricing for light bulbs. Perhaps there should be.

Real People Don’t Pay $40 for a Light Bulb

People will shell out $1000 for a big-ass TV that will probably last less long than the LED bulb.

But $40 for a light bulb — come on, that’s ridiculous! Let’s say that next year the LED price was $20, it would be close to the CFL.

But $20 for a light bulb — come on, that’s ridiculous!

1000 Hours Is Abstract, 25,000 Hours is Abstracter

Of course my cost calculation assumes that you use all 25,000 hours of your bulb. If you left it on all the time, that’s about 3 years of hours. But lets say you use it four hours a day instead. That’s 18 years.

An MBA/Financial Advisor would also hasten to point out that that $40, invested in a reasonably performing stock should be expected to yield about 8% per year. I think future value is the proper calculation (FV = P * (1 + i)ⁿ) — my $40 bulb would have to save me $159 ($40 * (1 + .08)¹⁸). So at a savings of $4.80/1000 hours … gold star to the first person who does this math and comments!

Because you know, when people shop, they’re all calculating the time value of money in their heads. Yeah, get real. The $40 they spend on the fancy bulb puts them $39 further away from the big-ass flat screen TV they want.

Real People Don’t Believe Manufacturer Claims

It has become painfully obvious from one of the most popular posts on the blog, my CFL review, that people don’t like CFLs.

People don’t believe that CFLs last. This is because people who tried CFLs bought the cheap ones. It is true: cheap CFLs break; good CFLs do last. I have been using them for more than 5 years, and even some of the cheap ones are still in action. And stores still sell cheap CFLs, next to the good ones.

People perceive that CFLs are dimmer than regular bulbs. This is because the industry started out with 60W equivalent bulbs, and most people use 100W or 75W bulbs. Also CFLs (especially cheap ones) take a 15 seconds or so to come up to full brightness — they are seen as being dim.

People perceive the light quality from CFLs is not as good. This is because the first years of CFLs were mostly “cool white”, and even when they sorted out color temperature retailers described the light helpfully as 2700 Kelvins. Somebody finally figured out “warm white” is a better term. They still haven’t figured out to stop selling the ugly ones.

People believe that CFL lights don’t dim well. On that point, they’re right. (Challenge to any retailer — please send a pair of PAR 30 or PAR 38 dimmable CFL bulbs that my wife will not replace in disgust. I have tried ten or 20 different dimmable CFLs, and they have all been terrible.)

I have talked to scores of people who discount all manufacturer claims. Many people turned off, especially when CFLs were new. The manufacturers and resellers did a terrible job of marketing CFLs — people tried them and they were worse in many ways. People formed impressions, and first impressions are hard to reset. And many of the problems are still around if you buy cheap CFLs today.

Today’s CFL light bulbs are far less expensive, high quality, warm white, and start much faster. But real people don’t believe that.

On many of these measures, LED light bulbs are better: instant on, dimmable, high quality, good light.

But $40 for a light bulb — come on, that’s ridiculous! :-)

Real People Don’t Want To Change

Real people don’t want to change unless they are getting something that is bigger, better, cheaper, cooler or more fun. It is probably a mistake for CFL or LED makers to try to create “comparable” lighting products, or suggest this is what people want. GM has got it right on the messaging for the new Volt: “It’s more car than electric.” — nice.

Real People Don’t Use 60W Bulbs

A 60W bulb is pretty dim. But 60W is as bright as retail LED bulbs get today — you can buy brighter, but they are usually specialty bulbs. I do think LED makers seem to be avoiding some of the traps the CFL makers fell into.

But the brightness thing is an issue. It probably won’t be resolved for another year or two.

We’re Not Really There Yet

Philips seems to be on the right track. But until we get a few more choices, and lower price, this specific LED bulb doesn’t make sense. But then again, most people said that our Prius wouldn’t make sense, either.

Always On (photo: uberculture)

The only way to find out: measure each outlet with a Kill-A-Watt! (Can you say “obsessive“?) But occasional obsessiveness is good for the soul. And budget.

So on the last grey Saturday, me and my trusty Kill-a-Watt went around seeing if we could answer the question: how much could we save?

The answer was neither encouraging nor discouraging: it was simply illuminating. (And, another $70/year, tax free savings — see the link to my spreadsheet below.)

And isn’t that what it’s all about? My objective in writing this blog, working for Energy Circle, learning about software, or digital cameras, Economics, Physics — it’s all about understanding the truth.

Oh, and the exercise was enriching. In the sense of having more money.

Progress So Far

I have been obsessing writing about the things that are always on, even when they’re off since the early days of this blog. And I have made some serious progress.

Killing Vampires with Smart Strips

I have addressed some phantom load with BITS Smart Strips. When my computer monitor turns off (which it does automatically based on the power settings of my computer), so do my speakers, my wireless phone charger, and my USB Hub. When the TV in the basement goes off, so does the sound system, the Wii, the DVD player, the sub-woofer (but not the Wii remote charger).

Replacing Our Cheap, Dead Phones We replaced our cheap wireless phones (that sucked from the start, and died within a year) with higher quality Panasonic phones. They work better, but the new phones also replaced 4 vampire transformers with 4 switch-mode type. Kill-a-watt reads 0 for all but the base station, which is 2W. Hopefully the new ones are not the cheap junk that defines most consumer electronics and will last a while. We’ll see.

Et tu, TiVo?

I confirmed that my TiVo Series3 HD is an improvement over the standard cable box that gets plugged in by your cable company — around 37W — not nothing, but it beats the pants off the 90W Motorola box I had before (which I had in addition to the TiVo Series 2 — the new TiVo doesn’t need the cable box, since it uses the CableCARD standard). I am going to try turning it off at night when we don’t use it using a simple timer switch I have lying around.

Sleeping Beauties

I confirmed that Sleep is better than Awake, at least as far as computers go. (This finding seems to apply to cats and teenagers, as well.) My MacBook uses about 15 Watts when on without the screen (it’s probably more efficient than most computers — my older Dell laptop uses about 35W). When asleep, both use about 1W.

Unfortunately, my Mac seemed to have the same sleep/standby problem as my Windows XP computer — it wouldn’t sleep automatically. I thought hitting the sleep button worked fine, then realized it did, but only for a few minutes, after which it would resume. I have been sort of careless with this, so spent some time figuring out how to make a Mac go to sleep reliably, and recently found a good (free) solution for sleepless Macs.

Not A Culprit! Sort of…

One interesting finding: I have been blaming the transformer on my cable modem as being a vampire — needlessly sucking power even when it wasn’t being used. So I bought a replacement switch-mode transformer, and plugged it in. But the cable modem still used 6 watts — it’s the modem itself. Rats!

In the experiment, I did, however find a simple device that could be used to replace vampire transformers with more efficient switch-mode versions. Maybe there’s some other transformer I can use this to replace.

The little (cheap) Ethernet switch I have in my office draws 4 watts — I doubt I need wires since 802.11n wireless seems to just work. My wireless laser printer goes to 5 watts when asleep — I could probably put that on the same timer switch as the TiVo. My new cordless phones have switch-mode transformers and use almost nothing. Apple chargers use almost nothing.

Who You Gonna Call: Dustbuster

The Dustbuster charger uses 2 to 3 watts all the time so that we can bust dust once or twice a month? Not worth it! That’s going to my “battery charger station” (regular power-strip) which I turn on only when I am charging stuff all our rechargeable AA and AAA batteries. The control for the sprinkler system, which we only use a few times in the summer — unplug. A new or repurposed BITS Smart Strip for my son’s Apple Mini (and speakers, LCD screen, USB hub).

However, It Doesn’t All Add Up

Am I being obsessive? Of course, I hope you have come to expect nothing less!

When you do the math, it adds up — 115 watts of “always on”.

That’s a little odd. When you look at Google PowerMeter, it measures a bit less than double that for its always-on estimate — there’s about 100W unaccounted for.

Wherefore Art Thou?

I wonder what I missed? I covered every single 120V outlet in the house (I even moved the stove and fridge out). It could be that Google PowerMeter’s estimate is wrong, but it correlates pretty closely to PlotWatt’s. Also, when I go to bed the TED sometimes reads as low as 196W, but never 115W. Could it be something that’s hard-wired (dishwasher, furnace, various lighting, ceiling fans)? Maybe the Kill-a-Watt is wrong? Maybe my math is wrong?

I did a test like this back on Earth Hour, where I switched off breakers one by one while watching the TED 5000 display. I did manage to get it down to zero, I think, and I recall something about a 1920′s era doorbell transformer. Hmm.

Wait, I just remembered — what about the garage? I have a rechargeable lawnmower — it’s got a charger plug I didn’t check. And there’s a garage door opener — that seems a possible suspect.

Not Playing With A Full Deck

Well, if it’s not obvious by now, I am purely a nut. Crazy. Whacked. Not rowing with both oars in the water. A quart low. Or, perhaps most apropos: “A few watts shy of a night light.” (Check the link, there are some pretty good ones :-)

Somehow There’s Always More Savings To Be Had

The key thing here is this: I have been crazy like this for years now. I keep doing things to reduce how much electricity we use. And I keep thinking, well, that’s surely about as much blood as I can squeeze out of this stone.

And then I go off and find more.

I still have some incandescent lights (granted, the Philips Halogena Energy Saving bulbs) in our kitchen and living room lights since dimmable CFLs still suck.

A Brief Digression on How Badly Dimmable CFL Bulbs Still Are, and Why Joe Barton Has A Point, Even If He Is A Lying Lier Who Has His Facts All Wrong And Is Just Trying to Get Elected, And How I Would Like Some Enterprising CFL or LED Manufacturer to Give Me Lightbulbs That Actually Dim Well So I Can Go Back To Disliking Joe Barton

By the way: that’s a direct challenge to any manufacturer who makes an R-20 or PAR-30 dimmable CFL, or better yet, LED that use a standard dimmer switch that can produce suitably bright light that isn’t ugly. I will be happy to accept demos, and if your product is good, I will write a great review here, and other places. But I am fed up and not spending more of my money for junk. I have now purchased more than 75 CFLs all of which claim to work perfectly, dim evenly, and all of which sucked!

I need 6 of the R-20 floods, 50W equivalent, and 7 of the PAR 30 or PAR 38 floods, 75W equivalent or thereabouts, both warm white. My email address can be found here.

(end of brief digression)

I suspect my fridge is worth replacing. We could use the dryer less (actually, here’s a great tip: if you have two medium loads of wash, dry both together and use about 30% to 50% less on drying). There are tons of things we could still reduce — but we try to only replace things when we need to.

The Bottom Line

Here’s a link to an Excel spreadsheet with device by device standby usage data.

With minimal investment my mitigations can save about 42W of “always-on” stuff. At my electrical rate, I’ll save about $70 a year. That’s a couple of very nice bottles of wine. Or a case of silicone caulk.

I have done a fair amount of research and think I understand why my macbook will not enter sleep mode, and how the OS X sleep process works. And importantly (and unlike Windows): what you can do to resolve the issue. The short answer is: there’s no built-in way to ensure your Mac goes to sleep automatically, but there’s a great bit of free software you can install, which in my tests works perfectly: PleaseSleep.

PleaseSleep will save me around $25/yr in wasted electricity (assuming I use it six hours a day, and it sleeps 18 hours). It will also prevent some unexpected battery depletion when I travel.

The Staggering Cost in Energy and Dollars of Sleepless Computers

If there are indeed a billion personal computers in the world, and for sake of argument 10% of them are suffering some sort of insomnia, and 10% of them are Macintoshes, that’s 10 million computers trying but failing to go to sleep. Let’s say I am over-estimating by 10 times, we’re talking about 1M computers that are sleepless. If each of them was like mine, needlessly using 20 watts for 18 hours a day, that would be a lot of watts, simply wasted.

Math? 20W * 18 hours/day = 360W/day/computer, * 1,000,000 computers = 360M Watt hours per day, or 360,000 kWh per day. In the US, the average price of a kWh is $0.10 so that’s about $13M/year in wasted electricity. And that’s just from Macs, assuming they’re all the most efficient ones (like mine) that for one reason or other don’t sleep. And for all of us Mac “fanbois” out there, assuming PCs are as bad and as efficient (they are worse, and less efficient), that’s another $117M/year in wasted electricity dollars. Granted, we probably spend that amount in a day fighting some war, but hey, this is about the things we can control.

My Macbook (late 2008, Unibody aluminum, 13″ screen) uses between 14 and 20 watts when the disks and screen are off — it was designed to use very little energy (one reason I bought it: yes, to be good to the planet, but also: the battery lasts longer). Older models, larger models, non-laptop, and more powerful models will use more if they don’t turn off. So, unless you have my computer or later, assume you have a less efficient model — pay the guy who gives away PleaseSleep accordingly.

So, making a lot of assumptions, my rough guess is that $13,000,000 per year is wasted by Macs that don’t sleep as expected.

But, fear not: we can control our computers. It’s easy (at least in this case). Download and install PleaseSleep for free. Then donate your first six months of electrical savings to the guy who wrote it. For most people (having lower electrical rates), that would be about $5 – $10.

I Think Guilt May Work With Apple (Tried With Microsoft: They Said “Upgrade to Vista”)

If Apple wants to call themselves environmentally responsible (and yes, Apple, you do, I know it’s true), they should spent the day or two it would take to build the functionality of PleaseSleep into their operating system. Heck, take a week and go the extra mile. If one nice guy can write a program to do this, surely Apple can do it, as well.

Heck, Apple should just pay the guy that wrote PleaseSleep $13 million dollars and just do the right thing.

Macintosh Insomnia and Related Sleeping Disorders

All recent versions of Mac OS X have an “Energy Saver” option in the Preferences panel. Preferences are set (and on by default) to turn off the hard disks, turn off the monitor, and then really enter “sleep mode”.

There doesn’t seem to be a problem with hard disk sleeping, nor does there seem to be a problem with turning off the monitor, but depending on your model, when it’s using the processor (doing some computing) the computer itself can use a little or a lot. Of course not all Macs fail to sleep properly. (And some won’t wake up, which I might describe as a more serious ailment.)

Why Macs Don’t Sleep

When a Mac (or other computer) is on, it’s doing various tasks : working. When you browse a website it’s working. When you type it’s working. When you download porn classical music it’s working.

But other things require the computer to do only a little work in the background: checking for new email, staying connected to the network, seeing if anything needs to be backed up, listening to see if anyone has requested a file on your shared drive, displaying accurate time and so on. Mostly, these kinds of tasks are non-critical. And they are especially not important when you are not using the computer. Yet it is frequently these non-critical tasks that prevent your trusty Mac from sleeping.

The decision about when to sleep is made by your Energy Saving preferences. Think of “Energy Saver” as the parents. “Time to go to bed, kids!”

The decision about whether to sleep could be overruled by any running program. The running programs are not just the ones in the dock that have the dot under them — they are also the ones in the menu bar along the top (the clock, battery indicator and so on). But there are more — so-called “daemons” that are waiting for the most mundane things to happen, in the background, invisible for the most part. If you have little kids they are analogous to “running programs”. If you have “tweens” they are like the menu bar programs. If you have teenagers, they are demons. Oh, I mean “they are like daemons”.

Or do I? Mu-ha-haha!

And of course at least a little of the computer has to be waiting for an indication that it should wake up. Sleep isn’t a dirt nap. It shouldn’t be eternal. Usually a keypress or mouse movement will wake up a sleeping Mac.

But any old program (it’s probably those daemons) can decided to ring the alarm. On my computer, I could get it to sleep manually (e.g. clicking the Sleep item from the Apple menu) … but within a few minutes, it would wake up. Programs that decide to wake a computer are one class of energy wasters — sneaky or passive-agressive ones.

In fairness, about the last thing programmers think about is whether their programs should accept requests to sleep. The trick is that some work is required to accept and respond to a request to sleep. And OS X demurs politely to any whose response is anything other than “Go for it, dude!”. Any one such ill-behaved little whippersnapper of a program can keep everything running. I’m a parent: I know what it’s like.

Why Can’t OS X Just Force Sleep?

Well here’s the thing. There are some programs whose execution is critically important. Or at least convenient. And at the very least some things in progress may need to finish.

At least some things that should wake the computer — the power button, a keyboard press, a mouse motion. Yet depending on how your computer is being used, you may want it to wake for other reasons. If you are sharing a folder for others at home, they may want to be able to get at it. If you screen-share with a computer at work, it will need to wake up. If your computer is a web server or database server it may not even want to go to sleep at all. Maybe you want your BitTorrent download to complete before the computer sleeps.

But when a program goes to sleep, it may have to do a few last things before bed. The network connection may need to alert the network, files open may need to be closed and stuff like that. The computer needs to make sure it’s in a consistent state so that when it wakes up, it will know what to do if things are a little different than when it slept. Maybe the network went away. Maybe the other computer sharing files or using your shares went away.

Once things are tidied up, OS X keeps everything in memory and remembers a few details about each of the processes running — a snapshot of the computer’s “state”, at which point it needs to do very little work, and sets the processor to idle state, and saves electricity … a lot. And if I am not mistaken, this state information is written to a compressed file on the disk so that in the case of power failure, the computer can still resume (this is known as hibernation).

How To Determine Which Program Is Preventing Your Mac From Going to Sleep

OS X does a lot better than Windows XP (the last version I used regularly) — it does create a log of such requests to sleep. And Macs tend to have a lot less junk installed on them — a favorite ploy of PC makers to get more money by installing crippled versions of software in hopes you’ll upgrade.

But in the end, OS X merely records the request to sleep, it does not force. You really have to be a geek to identify when a request to sleep was denied and figure out who. “Why it’s simple” (my co-geeks will say) — “just look at kernel.log through the Console!” Simple, for example, last time I moved my mouse when the computer was sleeping, here’s what Console (looking at kernel.log, of course) told me:


Sep 26 17:55:19 macbook kernel[0]: sleep
Sep 26 17:55:19 macbook kernel[0]: Wake reason = EHC2
Sep 26 17:55:19 macbook kernel[0]: System Wake
Sep 26 17:55:19 macbook kernel[0]: Previous Sleep Cause: 5
Sep 26 17:55:19 macbook kernel[0]: USB (EHCI):Port 2 on bus 0x26 has remote wakeup from some device
Sep 26 17:55:19 macbook kernel[0]: en1: 802.11d country code set to 'X0'.
Sep 26 17:55:19 macbook kernel[0]: en1: Supported channels 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 36 40 44 48 52 56 60 64 100 104 108 112 116 120 124 128 132 136 140 149 153 157 161 165
Sep 26 17:55:20 macbook kernel[0]: The USB device USB Receiver (Port 2 of Hub at 0x26200000) may have caused a wake by issuing a remote wakeup


So a hint: open Console.app (from Finder in Utilities), find the kernal.log from the list, and search on “wake” or “sleep”. Once you have found something plausible, note the time, and scroll to that time to see everything that’s happening. Of course, perhaps you’re not enlightened when you see crap like the above and say, “Aha, now I know what’s wrong!” You are like the other 98.9% of humanity, and perhaps the other 99.998% of people who bought Macs because they would never have to deal with such things, fear not.

For the rest of us (an elite bunch of nerds, I like to think), at least it’s possible. Why then we can write up useful blog posts that people will find and click on. But I think that’s really not the Mac/Apple way. I really think there should be a better part of OS X to do more than silently and obtusely record these events in some godforsaken log.

Indeed PleaseSleep has a nice little log of its own. And that helped me identify one problem preventing my computer from sleeping: one of my keys, or the touchpad was saying it was pressed … or something; enough to make Mac stay awake.

Links And Resources To Sleep Issues

• Apple’s Explanation of How Sleep Works
• Apple’s Explanation of Why Sleep Can Fail
• About 50 Suggestions, None of Which Worked for Me, But Might for You
• Implications that Upgrading to Snow Leopard Cause Sleep Issues, which I did, but none of the diagnostics suggested I had any issues
• More Stuff from Apple About Why Sleep May Not Work, None of Which Applied to Me, But Might for You

I want to put a timer switch on my TiVo because it uses 37 watts all the time (which is good compared to normal cable boxes, which TiVo replaces). But I only ever watch or record shows between noon and midnight — the TiVo is on half the time for no reason.

So I asked a question on the public support forum about whether turning the device on and off like this would hurt it.

I got a little helpful advice, but a flood of responses saying things like:

• The energy used to make the timer would never be offset by the amount of energy you save
• Don’t forget that the timer is an electrical device and consumes energy
• It boggles my mind that people would waste their time on saving a few cents a day
• The amount of energy you might save is tiny compared to X
• Don’t forget how much money you spend buying all the things that help you save energy
• It’s behavior like this that got us into all this trouble with mortgages and buying too much stuff

The first two items are potentially valid. Things take energy to make (and ship, etc.). To find out how much, you need to hire a very expensive reasonably priced Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) consultant like my friend Tom Gloria. And while Tom G. would be the first to caution me about this, a little common sense suggests that an $8 device that operates a tiny clock motor may have a relatively small footprint. And given that it has been sitting unused in a bin for three years, I would argue it’s a kind of resurrection of the “sunk cost” :-)

The next point is worth considering, and I did: the timer uses far less than 1 watt.

On the next point, granted, that I spend my time thinking about these things is truly inexplicable. But some people while away their time in various other pursuits such as fishing and photography of their pets — this is just my little peccadillo.

But the other comments are a little different — there’s something going on here. It seems like people think it’s pointless to save a little, or according to the last point, downright harmful. (Thankfully no one on the TiVo “community” forum attacked me on the grounds of the Jevons Paradox, because I would have lost it).

Am I missing the forest for the trees? Are my efforts to save energy counter-productive? Is it worse not to use something than to simply waste it?

Or have I perhaps just stumbled into the hornet’s nest that is today’s conversation about what is right? Sigh.

(As an aside, I asked a question of the official TiVo support and their response noted a “Standby” function I hadn’t noticed, which I will measure, and that I can easily use if it actually saves energy.)

I never have time to write here any more :-(

When you turn on your AC, some generator, somewhere has to work a tiny bit harder — it happens almost instantly and automatically. All of this is entirely invisible to you.

But, in the aggregate, when lots of people turn on their AC and this happens at scale, three things can occur:

• The generator (power plant) revs a little higher and produces more power, unless it’s at it’s capacity, then
• The power plant operator ramps up one of the “operating reserve” plants, unless they have already put all the spares online, in which case
• There’s a brown-out, or black-out

But actually there’s another option: consumers of power could just use less. But how do we know to use less — it’s invisible.

And, would we do anything is we know we were getting to the edge of capacity? What’s interesting is that some customers agree to unplug voluntarily. This link is to a story in the New York Times. It doesn’t surprise me that (some) people are willing to adjust their behavior without monetary incentives. What I found remarkable is how primitive the system for communicating the need is:

On the afternoon before an anticipated surge in demand, e-mails, faxes and phone calls go out alerting those who had already agreed that it is time for them to unplug.

So what if there were a way to automatically inform people of peak events? What if people that turned off appliances did get some economic benefit?

Some utilities have tiered rates based on time or day — the mechanism for tracking usage at a given time is there, at least in some places. In such a system, you pay a higher rate for power used during the day (peak) than for power used at night (off-peak). California has lead the pack on this — remember the rolling blackouts in 2002?

But There’s Efficiency Here, Too

But this turns out to be about more than just keeping the lights on. It’s about efficiency.

The electrical system needs to be highly redundant, plants are built to be able to generate more power than they usually need. The amount of power used during peak periods, whether daily or seasonally is significantly different than in off-peak periods. And more plants are built than are needed. The ones that are idle for all but peak periods are, naturally the older, or less efficient plants. Many factors make delivering all the power demanded during peak time a great deal more costly. Yet with flat rates, we just pay the average cost.

According to this article in Popular Mechanics:

Reserve plants are much more expensive to operate, resulting in large disparities in generation costs throughout the day and year. According to a 2004 report by the U.S. Government Accountability Office, it can cost up to 10 times more to generate electricity during a summer afternoon compared to at night, and the top 100 highest priced hours account for 10 to 20 percent of electricity costs for the 8766 hours in each year.

Wow!

My College Economics Thesis Lives — Who Knew?

I have written a lot about electricity monitoring, both here, and on Energy Circle.

But it also happens that in college, I wrote my Economics thesis on the general subject of managing use of a shared resource through pricing feedback. In 1984, my shared resource was the computer terminals (a keyboard and screen) on a time-share computer owned by the university which we all used to write our term papers — and a few of us also used for computer programming. At the end of the semester when papers were due, you would have to wait until 3 in the morning until there was a computer terminal available to type on. As I type this blog post on my personal computer, that sure does sound quaint :-).

So my thesis idea was: increase the price (yes, we paid for “computer time” by the hour!) during peak times, and decrease for off-peak times.

The key to making this work was that users had to be aware of pricing so they could schedule accordingly. That would be pretty easy for a computer system, presumably.

And now, 25 years later, a few customers of our electrical system have time-of-day rates, but not rates that are based on anything near real-time demand — it’s night and day rates, all year long. For more “real time” information, according to the NY Times, we use faxes. Not a lot of progress with our electrical grid in the last 25 years — talk about being quaint!

An Electricity Rate Monitor

So back to the electricity monitor. I have a few in my house. They tell me how much electricity I am using. Right now, we’re at 760W. Many have argued that knowing how much you are spending or using at the moment, which current monitors can do is fine, but what do you do with this information? It’s a fair question.

On the other hand, as the NY Times article demonstrates, even primitive methods of letting people know about peak demand periods are effective at reducing consumption. And in the Times article, the utility is not even changing rates, the people turning off lights are just being good citizens.

Imagine a system where the price of electricity you paid was adjusted to reflect the true cost of generating it, at the moment. If you knew you were paying ten times more for electricity on a hot August day than your usual rate, you might take some actions — perhaps wash dishes later, or dry clothing later, or turn down or off the air conditioner, or turn off the lights.

All you need to know is that rates are a higher than normal. Or lower. (And perhaps a lot higher and a lot lower).

(And perhaps if you had solar PV panels on your roof producing electricity at peak hours — you might feel happy knowing you were not only helping the problem, but also paying for your solar panels a lot faster. Eh? What about that?)

If we all had some simple visibility to rates, and rates were adjusted, not just on the super hot days, but on regular days, I would bet that we would all easily adapt our electrical usage in a rather startling way. Sure, you might still use the AC, but you might think a little harder about it.

Getting rates is easy — you have Internet in your house (you’re reading this, right?), so it’s almost trivial to get a device that can tell you what the current rate is … if your utility simply published it. To be sure, not everyone would need to have this — it’s just one plan option. Save money — buy your electricity at market prices!

And, keep in mind that with flat rates, which is what most consumers have now, we all pay those costs one way or the other. We have no visibility to the costs driving our bills, so we just pay the average of the total costs.

Allowing prices to fluctuate according to real costs would lower costs for the whole system, all other things being the same.

A slightly harder part of this is for the electric utility to know how much power you use, and when. Dumb meters only know the “how much” part. Smarter meters are needed to get the “when” part … but they do not need to be true “Smart Meters” to get simple tiered rate — many municipalities have meters that have a built-in clock so they can track how much electricity was used at a given time. But, to get the amount of power used at any given time, eventually you need a real smart-meter. Less than 10% of the US has smart meters now. But once you’ve got that, the rest is relatively easy.

A big idea here is: if you could tell people you were going to give them a way to reduce their electricity bills, this would be a good incentive to embrace smart meters.

By adjusting prices based on demand, and giving people access to pricing information through some in-house feedback, there’s a potentially dramatic change we could make to reduce our consumption smartly.

by Marcy Tate
 
Energy conservation is not only good for the planet, it’s also good for your pocket. It’s pretty simple to conserve energy at home and you’ll notice the savings right away. Still, changing your energy habits isn’t easy for every homeowner. Start by picking a few energy conservation techniques and gradually add a few more each month. As you go along, remind yourself how much of a help your efforts are for the planet and how much lower your utility bills will be. That should give you the inspiration to turn your energy conservation habits into a way of life. The tips below do not involve high investments. 

1. Light Bulbs

Those curly-shaped light bulbs, called compact fluorescent light (CFL) bulbs have been around for over a decade. If you haven’t replaced your energy wasting incandescent bulbs yet with CFL bulbs, then make this your first move in greening your energy spending habits. CFL bulbs last up to 10 times longer than incandescent bulbs. Here’s a chart from General Electric that will help you select your CFL bulbs:
 
Standard Bulb = CFL Bulb
40w = 10w
60w = 13w-15w
75w = 20w
100w = 26w-29w
150w = 38w-42w
250w-300w = 55w
 

2. Dimmers

Dimmers let you control the lighting in your home. When you need less lighting, you can easily dim the lights and save energy and money. Dimmers are inexpensive and can be used with most lighting fixtures, including pendant lights and recessed lighting. Dimming a light by just 10 percent more than doubles the bulb life.
 

3. Programmable Thermostats

A programmable thermostat is not only good for conserving energy, it’s extremely convenient. You won’t have to get out of bed if you have forgotten to lower your thermostat. Instead, you can program the thermostat to lower the temperature each night at a designated time. According to the US Department of Energy, you can save approximately 10% a year on your heating and cooling bills by turning your thermostat back 10°–15° for eight hours. Programmable thermostats give you the ability to do this easily.
 

4. Appliances & Electronics

Refrigerator

Refrigerators account for about 20 percent of household electricity use. Raising the temperature in the refrigerator will help lower your electricity usage. Check the gaskets around your refrigerator and freezer doors to make sure they are clean and sealed tightly. If they are not clean, it will cause the refrigerator to work harder, wasting unnecessary energy.
 

Water Heater

Turning the water heater temperature down can also save energy. Many thermostats are set to 140 degrees Fahrenheit. Lowering it by 20 degrees can save almost $100 a year.
 

Computer

Turn off your computer at night. According to the US Department of Energy, you can save an average of $90 a year. If you are in the market for a new computer, consider a laptop. They use less energy than desktop computers.
 

New Appliances

If you are in the market for new appliances, select energy-efficient models. Look for the Energy Star label on appliances. The label means that the product is an energy saving product.
 

5. Standby Power

Standby power, also known as vampire power, is the electric power consumed by electronic appliances while they are switched off or in a standby mode. Unplug appliances, power adapters and other electronic devices when not in use and you’ll save.
Microwaves, cell phone chargers, televisions, and power adapters for laptop computers should be un-plugged for optimal energy savings.
 

6. Weatherize

The little cracks and crevices around your home can cause hot or cool air to exit your home. Sealing the cracks and crevices can save you up to 15 percent in heating and cooling costs. Depending on where the draft is, you can use weather stripping or caulk to fill in the crack. Weather stripping is easy to install and your whole house can be weatherized in one day.
 

7. Insulation

Do you find that you need to run your heating or air conditioning unit all the time to achieve a comfortable temperature? It could be that you do not have enough insulation in your attic. Improper amounts of insulation means that the hot or cool air is entering and exiting your home, causing your heating or air conditioning system to work harder. This is a waster of energy. Adding insulation will keep the cold or hot air in your home.
 

8. Hang-Dry Laundry

Gas and electric dryers use a lot of energy to dry your clothes. There are many inexpensive drying racks on the market that can hold an entire medium sized load. Alternatively, consider cutting back on your dryer usage. You can do this by drying the clothes on a lower temperature setting or drying them until they are half dry and then hanging them to dry.
 

9. Stovetop

On gas burners, the hottest part of the flame is right at the tip. If your flame has a larger diameter than the pot you are heating, you are wasting a lot of the heat produced by the flame. If the flame isn’t under the pot, it’s not working to heat it. Avoid producing unnecessary heat by using a burner that is the same size as the pot or pan.
 

10. Home-Energy Audit

A home-energy audit assesses how much energy your home consumes. It also evaluates what you can do to make your home more energy efficient. Many local utility companies offer low-cost audits. Contact your local utility company to see if they offer this service.

Marcy Tate is a blogger at Networx. She is also a featured author at Electricians Networks.

Sure, we turn on lights earlier due to shorter days.

But there are other factors, and I am beginning to figure out what they are:

• More loads of laundry in the dryer: fewer shorts, more layers
• The gas burner uses circulator pumps to move water around the house’s heating system
• We use the gas oven more, meaning the “glow bar” I found a while back runs
• Humidifiers — the ones that create steam are basically boiling water all day!
• Fish tank heater — the house is cooler, but fishies like 80°F in all seasons (no fishie sweaters I know of)
• More TV and video games for the kids; less playing outside
• Christmas tree
• Probably a few sneaky ones I have not found yet…

Of course I was able to isolate these items just because we have an energy monitor (TED 5000, in our case) — it’s easy to see the readings jump when things come on, like the heat.

We can affect some of these (the cool mist humidifiers are far less costly). Some are just not ones I want to give up on, although the fishie sweaters seem plausible.

And one other item is worth noting: this year we put a lot of effort and a little money into making our house keep in the heat: insulation, and especially air sealing with foam and caulking — it’s pretty clear it’s going to make a big difference. And the less the heat is on, the less those circulator pumps run. These are the kinds of unexpected additive effects you sometimes get in making changes.

Three Great Things

The expected usage gives you a nice target, and the comparison to others provides a helpful benchmark.

But the new “Always On” measure provides two very helpful bits of information.

First, the darker bar helps isolate the spikes above. For example, the most obvious repeating spike above is the refrigerator — it cycles on about once per hour and runs for perhaps 25 minutes each time, running at a bit over 200W — it’s easy to see that pattern.

It’s also easy to get a rough estimate of the fridge’s individual contribution to my whole household use doing some simple math For example, it’s running about half of the time, using about 200W when running. This is the same as 100W all the time. If I know my electricity rate (I do, it’s 19.2 cents per kWh) I can do some math: 100W = 0.100 kW * 365 days * 24 hours * $0.192: this fridge costs about $45/year $170 in electrical costs (thanks to Ash for pointing out my math error!).

Second, the baseline is as clear as day: a bit less than 300W, which represents 7.1kWh/11kWh, or about 65% of my total electrical consumption. And that fridge, adds 100W to my overall baseline usage of around 300W.

Hmm, that means my fridge uses about 876 kWh per year. So let’s look at the EnergyStar site for comparable units (our current one is 22 cu ft), and we can see that the most efficient refrigerators sold today use 403 kWh per year — less than 1/2 of my 11 year old model. Wow! On the other hand, a fridge costs about $1,000, so I guess we’ll hold off until it stops working consider whether a 6-year payback makes sense for us.

Both of these data are things I can actually do something with. I would like to reduce my baseline/Always On number. Maybe I’ll follow my own advice and add a light timer to the TiVo, or even Internet connection and turn them off between 1 and 6 in the morning.

Similarly, the 6pm to midnight lump is just when we’re all home, at night with lights, dishwasher, TV and the like turned on. This just puts our usage in perspective.

The Third Good Thing

The Energy Detective (TED 5000) was the first device partner; a new UK company sells a similar and simpler looking device that also works with Google PowerMeter, called “Alert Me”. What is especially interesting is that they have a deal with a natural gas company — the device just knows how to read meters. While providing less detail than the TED, there is more to our energy picture than electricity. I am anxiously awaiting this product for sale in the US.

Progress is happening!