TheLittlestGuy

I’m house sitting right now. It’s dark outside and about 40 degrees F. I’m currently using this computer and a halogen lamp with a 50 watt light in it. I’m completely alone in this house right now and there’s tons of stuff on besides this 50 watt lamp and computer. There are actually 19 other lights on – or there were until I walked through the house, counted, and turned off a few. A short list of the other things consuming power follows.

Active loads: this desktop computer (plus two routers and modem), all the lights, one of the house’s heaters and fan, several digital clocks, two water heaters (check out inline water heaters), two refrigerators, a large deep freezer, and a pool pump (which runs for about eight hours every day). But that’s not all. There are lots of things that are consuming power but appear to be off – Phantom loads.

Phantom loads are appliances that are “off” but still drawing power. I walked through the house again to make a list of phantom loads. Microwave, two coffee makers, a ton of power supplies with unused chargers attached, three televisions, two DVD players, cordless phone bases/chargers, dishwasher, sprinkler system, garage door openers, printer, shredder, alarm system and probably a few more things that I didn’t realize were drawing power.

Many appliances draw phantom loads to give them that “instant on” feature. Go unplug your television and then plug it in again and turn it on. It turns on much slower than if you have just shut it off and turned it back on. That’s instant on. It takes your television a few seconds longer to turn on if you unplug it because power converters and inverters inside of it require a moment to charge before they can produce the right power output. When televisions are off but still plugged in these power inverters are charged and ready to provide power to the television at any moment. Other times, phantom loads are small LED lights which tells us that an appliance is turned off but still plugged in. Kind of worthless, right?

What a shame! All this stuff is on for me, the littlest guy, and I’m only using one or two lights and this computer right now. Of course, I’d like the food to stay fresh and I’d like to stay warm too. But, with the exception of a few things, most of the stuff that is currently drawing power in this house could be turned off without any real inconvenience to me. I can safely say that I’m wasting more power than I’m using right now. This is a serious problem that our society – and the societies of many other developed countries aren’t addressing.

I’m house-sitting right now and I have had some time to research and write. One article about carbon emission factors has expanded and become several articles. I’m currently using a halogen desk lamp so I can see. Allow me to crunch some numbers on this 50 Watt lamp.

In a previous article about carbon emission factors, I determined that my little lamp is producing about 45 grams of CO₂ for every hour that it’s on. The Trees for the Future website claim that for $0.10 a “fast-growing, beneficial, permanent” tree can be planted to remove “about 50 lbs. of CO₂ from the atmosphere each year” for about 40 years. (http://www.treesftf.org/about/cooling.htm). If true, about 22,500 grams of CO₂ can be absorbed from the atmosphere a year from one tree. My lamp produces about 45 grams of CO₂ an hour.

That’s great news for us because if I plant one tree then I can run this light a lot without adding any net CO₂ to the atmosphere! Well, kind of. If I plant one of these trees then I can run this 50 Watt light for 500 hours a year (22500 g / 45 g/hr = 500 hr). It’s already been on about 10 hours the last few days as I’ve been researching and writing at my temporary desk. If I kept up this pace of writing, then it wouldn’t take me long to hit that 500 hour mark. Okay, so my one plant doesn’t get me as far as I’d like. But that’s only a small part of the problem. There are two bigger problems. 1) I haven’t planted any trees or large plants this year. 2) I currently have a lot more stuff on right now than this one lamp. There are actually 19 other lights on – or there were until I walked through the house, counted, and turned off a few. I bet if you stop reading this right now and walk around your house or apartment (or wherever you happen to be) you’ll find tons of stuff consuming power.

another problem

Much of the energy produced to power this 50 watt lamp is wasted in the form of heat anyway. I didn’t turn this lamp on to heat the room. I turned it on for light. Lamps are not very efficient ways to heat houses – heaters are much better at this. During hot summers this is actually a huge pain. We turn lights on so that we can see and those lights then increase the temperature of the air in the room and also make us feel warmer (like the sun’s rays warm us up when we go outside). Then we turn our AC units on so that we are comfortable. We’re using energy for the lights and the AC unit. If our lights produced less heat, then our AC units would run less often (and actually last longer too) saving us money, conserving rapidly depleting fossil fuels, and helping to reduce CO₂ emissions. That’s why I have replaced all the lights that I use often with low energy lights bulbs (link!). These lights are more efficient because they produce much less heat than this halogen lamp – which is actually hot enough to sizzle when I touch it with a wet finger. Common sense tells me that the lamp is at least 100 degrees C and that means a lot of energy is being wasted as heat.

so what’s the lesson?

First, we have to conserve energy. We can do this by running things less or by making them more efficient. This 50 watt lamp (and more of the lights in this house) should be replaced with energy saving bulbs. Many of the lights in this house should be on timers (or better yet, light sensors) so that they are on only when they need to be. Phantom loads should be found and minimized. There are tons of little things we can do to use a little less energy, and lots of larger things we can do to save a lot more energy. The less energy we consume the more time we have to find sustainable alternative energy sources and the less we pollute our planet.

Second, we have to find ways to remove CO₂ from the atmosphere and to offset our carbon production. So seriously, go plant a tree this weekend. Have your kids help you and explain to them why the little things add up.