Hidden Electricity "Vampires"

In the last installment we looked at how simply changing out some of your incandescent light bulbs with new energy efficient compact fluorescent bulbs can save hundreds of dollars annually. It can also result in less overall power demand and a significant reduction in the need to burn fossil fuel at generating plants. Less use of scarce resources and less pollution in our air are both very important.

This week we will look at some less obvious devices that may seem at first to be very insignificant but actually consume substantial amounts of electricity over time. We call them Electricity “Vampires.”

One of the negative byproducts of our digital age is the proliferation of devices that require small power supplies that draw current 24/7. Most electric devices of years past consumed current only when they were actually being used. This is no longer the case. For example, even when your TV is turned off, it most likely is consuming between 5 and 15 watts of electricity per hour. This keeps the clock set; the favorite channel selection updated, and allows for an almost instant picture when you do turn it “on.”

Look around your house. I bet you can find a dozen or more small power supplies plugged into outlets. The cell phone or iPod charger, the telephone answering machine, the wireless telephone hand set, the electric screw drive charger and stove timer, all consume small amounts of electricity. When you add them up and figure that most other houses on your street, in your town and in your state all have many of the same appliances, the amount of electricity being used is significant.

It is not practical to turn off some of these devices since doing so will often cause memory loss and the need to re-program them. For those of you without teenagers this can take hours. In other cases, just unplugging chargers when not in use is a good start.

Here are a few other tips:
- If you are going away for three or more days, turn off your hot water heater
- Put motion sensors on lights in hallways, garages etc.
- Use only the amount of light you need for the task at hand.
- Open those windows and use a fan instead of A/C

The bottom line is that energy conservation is a cumulative thing. If everyone does a few things, the impact can be significant.

Save Big and Be Green with Compact Fluorescents

Much attention has been given lately to global warming and the need for all of us, especially those of us in the United State and other industrialized countries, to conserve resources and reduce our contribution to global pollution. If you’re like me, when I hear the reports or read the accounts in newspapers or magazines, it still seems like something that needs to be addressed by someone else. Many of us have the tendency to think that what we do individually makes little difference. That of course is not true. Over the next two weeks I will give you some suggestions for saving electricity thus reducing pollution from our local coal fired generators. At the same time I’ll give you an added incentive, since you will not only be saving energy but be able to put a few bucks back in your pocket.

In any house there are visible and invisible consumers of electricity. Some will surprise you and you will be amazed at the amount of energy (and cash) you can save with just a few changes.

Among the most visible consumers of energy is lighting. Let’s look at household lighting and how to accomplish some significant savings.

I checked with my friends at Duke Energy to arrive at an average residential cost per kilowatt hour. In other words, how much does it cost to use 1000 watts of electricity for one hour? The answer, in the Greater Cincinnati Area including Indiana, but not Kentucky, is 10 cents. I will use that number to compute the cost savings throughout this article. If you don’t live here you will need to find out from your electric provider your KW/H cost.

With that in mind I did a little auditing of my own habits to see what impact I could have on reducing my own energy consumption and what that might mean for my utility bill. I have already changed out the bulbs in several lighting fixtures with highly efficient compact fluorescent bulbs. These new bulbs come in a variety of sizes with varying light outputs. Some can be used with dimmer switches. (Be sure to look on the package since not all will work with dimmers.)

Currently you can purchase compact fluorescent light bulbs that provide the same amount of light (or lumens) as a standard incandescent bulbs but use a fraction of electricity. Those bulbs will last 10 times longer. Let’s do the math. If you use a 100 watt bulb in a lamp in the family room and it is turned on an average of five hours per day (more in the winter, less in the summer) that will work out to 1,825 hours per year. If you use the regular incandescent bulb, it will consume 182,500 watts in one year ( 182 kwhrs) costing you $18.00. If you replace that incandescent bulb with a compact fluorescent bulb using only 23 watts per hour, you will pay $4.00 for the same amount of light for an annual savings on that single lamp of $14.00

If you look around your home, I bet you can find a dozen or more lighting fixtures that can be changed out with little effort and a modest expense. Even figuring in the higher cost to purchase each compact fluorescent light bulb, you will have a net cash savings at the end of the year. Each year thereafter will save you more than $150 if you change out 10 or 12 bulbs. The reduction in electric demand of course will lessen the need for Duke to burn coal to make electricity in the first place.

In the next post we will look at some less visible electricity “vampires.”

Getting together with old friends

Last winter I finally got around to a project that I had been promising myself for several years that I would complete. Over the past 45 years, like many persons of my age, I had collected a fairly robust collection of records. Not CDs, tapes, cassettes or even mp3 files, but real grooved platters fashioned of black vinyl. Some even had a large hole in the center. If you don’t know what that means, ask someone over the age of 45.

In my case, some of the records had been re-released in CD format, but most were not available and I am a cheapskate at heart. For example, my favorite Christmas album of all time was one done by Stan Kenton and no longer available except for some astronomical amount on eBay. Some other classical piano albums actually recorded by Arthur Rubinstein were also not available on CD. Even though we still do have a turntable connected to our stereo, playing one record at a time was just too much of a hassle. So the records were stacked in a corner of the basement gathering dust and some other crud associated with benign neglect storage.

If you find this scenario ringing true for you, I may have a solution. You can easily make CDs or MP3 copies of your records with little effort and some inexpensive software. All you need is a working turntable, a computer that has a CD burner installed and some software.

I used software from DAK www.dak.com. Don’t let the garish web site discourage you. The software really was easy to use and made very good copies of the records. It even had settings to get rid of scratches and other imperfections on the records. There is one setting that allows you to identify each blemish and clean it up one by one. This was a real hassle and I soon opted for the automatic version. The latter does cut down a bit on the audio fidelity, but it provided a clean, clear copy of the vinyl record. For about $70 you get a pre-amplifier/mixer that you can plug into your computer and the software needed to make your copies. If you need a turntable, there is one available at extra cost. I can’t recommend the turntable since I did not purchase one from DAK.

There are other companies like Hammacher Schlemmer www.hammacher.com that have stand-alone copying machines. They are pricey, i.e. $400, but they do a good job. Since you most likely will do this task only once, unless you are a collector of vintage records, I question why someone would spend so much on a single purpose machine.

If you don’t want to do it yourself or you only have a few records to copy there are services that will do this for you. Locally, DLFmusic will provide this service for prices starting at $14.00 for each copy. www.dlfmusic.com. I have not used this company and from looking at the web site I would think it is most likely based in some basement. So I don’t have an opinion on the quality of their work. You might ask for references or just try one record first.

One of the by-products of doing it yourself comes in the fact that you have to play each album as you make the copy. It was really fun to listen to some music that I had not heard in many years. For example, I have one of the early Simon & Garrfunkel albums when they were performing under the moniker Tom & Jerry. Last January and February, each evening I would choose an album to copy and in about one hour, I had a CD version and some good memories.

So next fall, why not get reacquainted with old musical friends and invite them into the digital age?