How Energy-efficient Electronics Work

better known as your electronics. Some of you may not know this, so there was an article in Forbes that said the average American household spends one thousand, four hundred dollars each year on energy bills. That's a that's a pretty hefty chunk of change. Well, it's not surprising. I mean, if you think about it, a good sized plasma TV can use up to fifty watts U Xbox seven, PlayStation three seven watts. I mean you know those that that's

not an h in substantial amount of electricity there. Yeah. Actually, there was a recent UH story published by Choice, which is a consumer group in Australia that specifically looked at game consoles and computers and UH they found that even if you are running a PS three on idol. So, so the machine is on but you're not doing anything. It runs on about a thirty one point seventy four killer what hours per week, which they figured out was

five times more than your medium sized refrigerator. So and if you're playing a game, well watch out because it consumes even more power. The we by the way, was the least taxing on your energy. It ran on three point one four killer what hours even if you're playing a game, so one tenth of what the PlayStation three runs on. Yeah, you know a lot of these machines too,

I mean the WE. I own a we um and if you leave it Internet enabled so that they can pull down messages from your friends, it's on even when it's not on, you know where you actually see something on the screen. So it's you know, you may forget about these things, but they're always draining some kind of electricity. Actually, a lot of electronics do that. Um. There's even a term for it. There are several, in fact, but the

most popular one is probably vampire power. Uh. A vampire electronic device is one that is going to draw power even if the device itself has been powered off. So even televisions do this. That's mostly because UH TVs need a little time to warm up when you turn them on, and by draining this a little bit amount of power, it decreases the amount of time it takes for a

television to completely power up. So um, so there's reasoning behind it, but it means that even if you've turned off everything in your house, things are still drawing power. That's true, and um you know, there are a lot of ways that you can combat this. You can always unplug your your devices. You can turn off a power strip if if your TV and video game consoles are plugged into a power strip. But some manufacturers are looking into ways to cut down the amount of electricity that

they use even when they're on. For example, of when Jonathan and I went to the Consumer Electronics Show earlier this year, we saw television called the Eco TV offered by Phillips, and it's an an l C D t V. UH They use a lot of light to power the screen. But what the Eco TV does it measures the amount of ambient light in the room, so it can adjust how much light it puts out to power the image on the screen based on the amount of light that's

coming in the room, So it can kind of you know. Yeah, like if you if you watch television in the dark room, you don't need as much power to to make the image visible. So uh so watching, uh watching those movies in a nice little dark home theater system is of energy efficient in fact, so hey, I'm what do you know? I'm energy efficient because that's the way I prefer to watch my movies and television. Uh. And in the United States,

the there's there's even a thing called energy Star. Now energy Star that's sort of a designation about if something has the energy Star label on it, that means that it meets certain standards which are constantly being revised, and by revised, they're usually getting better rather than worse, which is a relief in the United States. Really true true?

Um yeah. As a matter of fact, there are a number of uh different kinds of ratings that you can get in addition to Energy Star, the manufacturers coalitions have

put together some some different ones too. Um. But basically, if you can see the energy Star rating on the side of a box, you know that it is meeting minimum Environmental Protection Agency standards for uh, you know, energy usage, right and uh And as our article points out in two thousand seven, the Americans using energy Star products prevented forty million metric tons of greenhouse gases from entering the atmosphere. And that's that's that's significant. Yeah, that is that is

fairly significant. UM. One of the ways one of the kinds of machines that use an awful lot of electricity, and a lot of machines aren't energy Star certified. Our computers, computer monitors, yes, computer monitors, depending on the monitor. A lot of the CRT s, the old style big tube monitors, those, um, those you use up a lot more electricity in general than you are flat panels. UM. But you know, we looked at several of the different machines out there, um,

and there are some that are are starting to come down. Like, um, there's a new uh, a new computer offered by Cranberry that only uses nine wants of electricity And a story that has been in the news and set lately about the Cherry Poal, which is a kind of cloud computer very similar to the Cranberry and it only uses two wats of electricity. Right, it really cuts down the moving parts, you know, things like they get rid of things like the fan UH and hard drives, the spinning hard drives

and that really helps cut down on power consumption. Uh. And of course we there are other things that we can talk about when we're talking about energy efficiency. We can talk about handheld devices and alternative means of powering them, like solar panels. For example. You could have a solar powered energy source to charge your iPod for example. True.

And there's another example that we used, the Nokia Eco Sensor, which is a UM sort of prototype, I guess, And it uses a combination solar panel that you can wear on your wrist, but it's combined with a kinetic energy generator. So if you're, you know, waving your arms wildly like I am right now, UM, you can charge up your pd A as you are are gesticulating while they are making your friends wonder if you're insane. You go, no,

I'm just charging my p A right. In a related story, I read a great in The Independent, as a newspaper in the United Kingdom, written by Adrian so about she She proposed a certain kind of energy generating piece of clothing. We're talking about a They call it the bionic bra. Uh. It's a bra that would harness the power of moving breasts to generate electricity um, which is a brilliant although as NPRS wait wait, don't tell me pointed out, that might mean that guys start referring to women by how

long a song they'd be able to play. So if it powers down completely, do you get memory loss? Ha ha ha ha um. But to be serious, she was. She was asking actual engineers about the the feasibility of this, and some of them surprisingly said it's completely feasible. Uh. There was an engineer named Wong at Georgia Tech, which is just down the road from us, who his team's working on creating fabric made out of nano wires that can transform friction into electricity, so the more you move around,

the more electricity you would generate. And he was thinking of using it in things like T shirts and stuff like that, you know, things that things that you would wear that you would you know, just have a lot of movement in general. And he said, bras are are a legitimate use for this technology. So we may actually see a broad generating electricity soon or not see it. I mean it would probably be under clothes, so we probably wouldn't actually anyway, you know what I mean. I

feel like i've stumbled into some kind of booby trap. Yes, I would say, so, really it looks like, rather than you know, just looking at ways to cut down on the amount of electricity they use manufacturers, you're also looking into alternative ways to power that. So maybe through the combination of these things, we can reduce the load of electricity that we're using from from generating fossil fuels and are not generating fossil fuels. Generating electricity from fossil fuels.

Right in the United States generates more than its electricity from coal, so that would be I would be a big improvement to find alternative ways of generating electricity. So now you'll shift from that to watching people, you know, flip and flop their way down the sidewalk as they go to work and try to listen to their iPods. I don't see this conversation getting any better. We might want to end this now. So if you're interested in reading more about that, we have a brand new article

called how energy efficient Electronics Work. It's available today on how stuff works dot com. Thanks for listening for more on this and thousands of other topics. Does it how stuff works dot Com? Let us know what you think send an email to podcast at how stuff works dot com. Brought to you by the reinvented two thousand twelve camera. It's ready, Are you