The response missed the greatest path of phantom (or vampire ) electric use.
Forget about the wall warts. Instead consider all the things that use a remote. The TVs (all of them) VCRs, stereos, etc. and don’t forget garage door openers, fans and such trivial places as anything with a clock. Not only the alarm clock, but consider the microwave, a stove with a digital timer etc.
A Short while ago the New York Times wrote that the typical house had 27 hidden users when you thought they were off. My own survey beat that number by a few culprits.
That was sort of covered by the mention of appliances in “standby mode”, and it was the root cause of the VCR that ate so much energy which was mentioned in the column. It could have been expanded upon, but there is limited column space, and in many cases one actually wants the items in standby mode on - it’s a balance of convenience versus energy savings. I certainly don’t want to be unplugging my microwave, range oven, bedroom alarm clocks, and even my television set every time I leave the house for more than a few hours. Whereas leaving transformers connected to nothing, provided they’re not “smart” enough to shut the flow through the coils off, is a total waste of energy. And of course a VCR that doesn’t get used but once every 3 months is a waste as well…
Of course the Master never needs correction but I might add to his comments on capacitors;
Its true that capacitors are used to correct power factor and improve efficiency for both utilities and large customers.
However, for a while there was a belief that capacitors could be used to cause under-billing. Adding significant amounts of capacitance to a home load was thought to overcompensate, making the power factor way off the ideal point, and drive the electric meter into a state where it would under-read.
I haven’t heard of this succeeding, and my contacts in the electric industry told me that home electric meters were accurate enough no matter what you did to them.
Another thing people tried was hanging large permanent magnets on the meters to attempt to saturate the internal coils of the meter. That didn’t work either, as far as I know.
And of course some people would just paint the meter face so it couldn’t be read (some meter reads carried scrapers with them to deal with that) Remote/radio meter reading avoids that scam completely.
Now there are a couple ways to cheat the meter but and they are all dangerous or at least outright illegal, but none of the ones above worked.
There is the inductive loss through the coils, which was sort of the whole point of half of the column. It’s usually very small, but it adds up when you have a hundred million homes over 8760 hours in a year. And it’s avoidable by unplugging the transformer.
I can’t imagine what goes through someone’s head to try this. It’s like a person I knew of in my old neighborhood, who always kept his two VERY mean Labradors loose in his back yard: “That way, the damn meter reader can’t see what the meter says.” Genius came home one day to a massive citation on his front door and a dead dog after one of the dogs bit the meter reader and was shot by the police (the other one was taken by Animal Control, and subsequently destroyed). Some people just don’t seem to think things through sometimes.
Ahh its all coming back now…the good old days when I worked with electric utilities…
Another dodge was to try to use a magnifying glass to focus sunlight on the bearings of the spinning wheel, to try to screw that up (no/fewer spins reults in lower readings on the dials).
I’m not sure how load demand works. Power companies have to be able to generate a certain amount to meet a load. One of the fellows here told me they used their hydro electric to power toasters and hot water heaters in the morning. My point being that if 100,000 guys unplugged block transformers that weren’t running anything, I don’t thing the power company could shut down one of it’s generators. I’m not sure what proportion of the load that would be, if it would even be noticeable.
First, there’s power-on surge. When you first turn on power to a high-use device, there’s a surge of electricity through the wire - particulary a big motor, until the power induces a magnetic field to resist the surge. (Remember the days when the freezer or washing machine kicking in would blink the lights?) This surge can be moderated, IIRC by running it through an RC (resistor-capacitor) circuit - or just a capacitor, since the device might provide enough resistance. The surge is reduced as the voltage and current build up over a longer delay (say, 1/4 sec.)
Someone once sold something similar as a light-bulb life enhancer trick; you put this device like a small coin into the lightbulb socket (Push it in with your finger?) and screw in the bulb so this was in-line with it. The theory was until the filament was red-hot and a higher resistance, the initial surge and the sudden heat change was what damaged lightbulb filaments the most. Do it a bit slower, and the bulb will last much longer.
As for overall capacity of the system - the sad fact is that electricity needs to be there when you all need it, or you get brown-outs; sort of like the pressure going down if everyone uses the water at the same time. Hydro companies have to have capacity to meet peak demand. Typically this involves standby generators that fire up for the evening dinner-cooking or daytime air conditioner load.
Like airline seats and hotel rooms, hydro has to be available when it’s needed and can’t be stored for future. All a wind farm can do for example, is mean the other, natural gas-powered generators use less gas sometimes. However, the modern generators can adjust. Especially the big hydro dams, they can adjust the water flow second by second to meet the power draw of customers. There are lots of hair-brained schemes for storing power - giant banks of capacitors, pump water uphill, fuel cells and hydrogen-making, or even a giant super-conducting ring where electrons circle forever until they are drawn out. Each has its drawbacks and is not (yet?) practical.
The ideal technique for power management is smart appliances and demand metering. If the cost forelectricity goes up when everyone needs it, then you would take advantage of smart appliances. For example, let your furnace and freezer take turns using power so the total peak is less. Let your freezer cool an extra 10 degrees overnight when rates are low, so that it doen’t have to come on during the morning toaster cycle. We’re half-way there with smart thermostats that turn down the heat in the daytime when nobody’s home.
Maybe you plug your hybrid into the house and it powers your TV in the evening; then charges all night. Everyone will soon have these giant batteries just sitting around in the garage; they could do some of the load balancing for the electric company…?
I think that was a diode that would rectify the current and send a half cycle to the bulb.
The guy at Arkansas Power & Light told me several years ago the dam filled during the night, and most of the available power was used to make breakfast and shower in the morning.
I would think hybrids would make it worse, although they will charge at night when the load is probably low; save for the air conditioners running here in the South.
Cecil, you silly fool. Capacitors, unless I slept through that class (a possibility, I admit), are not used in AC circuits, and are dielectric, not magnetic devices. I think you might have meant inductors.
I read a lot about this during the bad SoCal brownouts several years back. Apparently they need to have the right amount of power every second. If they have too little, or too much, it causes some kind of cascading chain failure, which is what lead to our “rolling brownouts” or “rolling blackouts.” Rolling brown/blackouts happened either as a self-defense mechanism in the system (to avoid blackouts), or because there was a fluctuation of power in one area. An area reduces its power or shuts its power down temporarily in order to balance out the load in the rest of the system. If it didn’t do that, the whole system would crash. I’m sure I have a detail or two wrong, but that was the gist of it.
Some of them aren’t all that hare-brained. There’s also the idea of compressing air in a cannister, and using the released air to provide power. Heck, there’s cars that drive around on that kind of power. When you “refill” or “power up” your car, you’re really hooked up to an air compressor which is shoving air into a container, kind of like pumping gas into a tank, or filling a battery with a charge. Apparently we now have the right kinds of materials to create a container that loses its stored air energy very, very, very slowly.
The idea of pumping water uphill (or, one assumes, just up a pipe) sounds cool.
These are good ideas, but are ideas that are even more awesome because they can be combined with all of the other energy saving ideas around. Smart appliances + better power storage + better power transfer + cleaner power source is better than that list of things without smart appliances. Or any other item. I’d like to suggest that local or personal generation of power is a needed thing, also. People putting solar panels on their roofs, heating water with the sun, wind generators, etc. is great. If a person can reduce their reliance on the grid by any percentage, that’s great.
Or an all-electric vehicle. One idea proposed by the government is that as electrically powered vehicles become more popular, we change the rates based on the time you use the electricity. So if your district’s peak load is between certain hours, the rates are higher then. So people would be encouraged to begin charging their vehicles at night. Charging your car is something that you can do any time you aren’t driving it, as opposed to running your microwave which you only do when you need it. It’s tough to change your microwaving habits, but easy to determine when you charge your car. For 4 hours after you get home from work? Or for 4 hours after the rates drop while you’re sleeping? (Speaking of smart appliances, tell me you won’t be able to pre-program when your car will begin charging?)
So it does make sense that you could reverse the charge from your car to your house during the day and reduce your power usage during the hours the cost is highest. After all, you’re going to pump that energy back into your car, right? In a sense, you’re reducing your electricity costs doing it that way. So you power your microwave from your car during the day (when rates would make the microwaving cost you $0.10, just to choose a number), but then charge that same amount of power back into your car at night for only $0.06. You just saved $0.04! (Which adds up when you also watch TV and do other activities during high rates time…)
I also read an article that buses in some cities can be plugged into a local building and they run the bus engine to feed power back in to the building during power outages. Several buses can power a hospital, a police station, etc.
Yeah, you obviously did sleep through AC Circuits 101. Capacitors absolutely are used on AC circuits. As one everyday example, go ahead and look behind your refrigerator, down where the compressor is. You’ll see a big, honking cap which helps the compressor motor start up from a dead stop. As a previous poster noted above, they are also used in heavy industry where highly inductive loads such as large motors cause problems with low power factor. A properly-sized capacitor across such a load creates a phase shift which is equal and opposite to the phase shift caused by the load, thus bringing the power factor closer to unity. Unity power factor is important to power companies because that’s the point at which maximum power is delivered to customer loads and minimum losses occur in generation and distribution equipment. As such, industrial customers are billed for power factor as well as total kWH used, to encourage them to use power-factor correction. Caps are also used as filter components in various types of networks in AC applications ranging from power distribution to audio equipment to radio and TV.
We have this one radio that – and no doubt this is due to Thai manufacturing – will continue to play for one or two seconds after it’s been unplugged. In fact, if the radio is turned off when its unplugged, if you turn it on anytime after that, no matter how long, it will play for one or two seconds. It’s weird, but it’s like it’s trapped some residual electricity just waiting to be used. This is the only appliance, Thai or otherwise, that I’ve ever had do this.
The TV is plugged into a power strip that itself has an on/off switch. These are commonly used in Thailand, not to save electricity, but as a fire-prevention strategy. When we do that, we can see the standby light on the TV go out; it’s the same as unplugging the set. I’ve often wondered if the longevity of our set – coming up on 15 years now and still working fine – is due to the absence of a steady stream of current around the clock; there’s only power to it when we want to watch it.
I’ve seen things do that occasionally. It’s due to large power supply filter capacitors with no bleeder resistor across it. Those big electrolytics can store a charge for days or even weeks.
The radio has an internal power supply that uses a capacitor to smooth out the rectified AC. (I’m simplifying here) Larger capacitors are used to do a better job of smoothing. When you unplug the radio, there is still DC stored on the capacitor that will continue to power the radio for a little while.
Newer equipment uses ‘switching mode’ power supplies (no room for a description here) which can employ much smaller capacitors and consequently go really-off faster. I’m not sure if consumer devices like radios use them, but things like the power supply in your computer likely do.
The Nantahala River in North Carolina is also like this. The river is shut off at night, and the floodgates are opened in the morning to provide power and allow people to raft and kayak the whitewater.
