Speaker 1: Brought to you by the reinvented two thousand twelve camera.
Speaker 1: It's ready. Are you get in touch with technology? With
Speaker 1: tech stuff from how stuff works dot com. Hey there,
Speaker 1: welcome to the podcast. My name is Chris Poulette. I'm
Speaker 1: an editor here at how Stuff Works, and with me
Speaker 1: is wonderful writer Jonathan's Strickland. How today we're going to
Speaker 1: be talking about some of those energy suckers in your house,
Speaker 1: better known as your electronics. Some of you may not
Speaker 1: know this, so there was an article in Forbes that
Speaker 1: said the average American household spends one thousand, four hundred
Speaker 1: dollars each year on energy bills. That's a that's a
Speaker 1: pretty hefty chunk of change. Well, it's not surprising. I mean,
Speaker 1: if you think about it, a good sized plasma TV
Speaker 1: can use up to fifty watts U Xbox seven, PlayStation
Speaker 1: three seven watts. I mean you know those that that's
Speaker 1: not an h in substantial amount of electricity there. Yeah. Actually,
Speaker 1: there was a recent UH story published by Choice, which
Speaker 1: is a consumer group in Australia that specifically looked at
Speaker 1: game consoles and computers and UH they found that even
Speaker 1: if you are running a PS three on idol. So,
Speaker 1: so the machine is on but you're not doing anything.
Speaker 1: It runs on about a thirty one point seventy four
Speaker 1: killer what hours per week, which they figured out was
Speaker 1: five times more than your medium sized refrigerator. So and
Speaker 1: if you're playing a game, well watch out because it
Speaker 1: consumes even more power. The we by the way, was
Speaker 1: the least taxing on your energy. It ran on three
Speaker 1: point one four killer what hours even if you're playing
Speaker 1: a game, so one tenth of what the PlayStation three
Speaker 1: runs on. Yeah, you know a lot of these machines too,
Speaker 1: I mean the WE. I own a we um and
Speaker 1: if you leave it Internet enabled so that they can
Speaker 1: pull down messages from your friends, it's on even when
Speaker 1: it's not on, you know where you actually see something
Speaker 1: on the screen. So it's you know, you may forget
Speaker 1: about these things, but they're always draining some kind of electricity. Actually,
Speaker 1: a lot of electronics do that. Um. There's even a
Speaker 1: term for it. There are several, in fact, but the
Speaker 1: most popular one is probably vampire power. Uh. A vampire
Speaker 1: electronic device is one that is going to draw power
Speaker 1: even if the device itself has been powered off. So
Speaker 1: even televisions do this. That's mostly because UH TVs need
Speaker 1: a little time to warm up when you turn them on,
Speaker 1: and by draining this a little bit amount of power,
Speaker 1: it decreases the amount of time it takes for a
Speaker 1: television to completely power up. So um, so there's reasoning
Speaker 1: behind it, but it means that even if you've turned
Speaker 1: off everything in your house, things are still drawing power.
Speaker 1: That's true, and um you know, there are a lot
Speaker 1: of ways that you can combat this. You can always
Speaker 1: unplug your your devices. You can turn off a power
Speaker 1: strip if if your TV and video game consoles are
Speaker 1: plugged into a power strip. But some manufacturers are looking
Speaker 1: into ways to cut down the amount of electricity that
Speaker 1: they use even when they're on. For example, of when
Speaker 1: Jonathan and I went to the Consumer Electronics Show earlier
Speaker 1: this year, we saw television called the Eco TV offered
Speaker 1: by Phillips, and it's an an l C D t V.
Speaker 1: UH They use a lot of light to power the screen.
Speaker 1: But what the Eco TV does it measures the amount
Speaker 1: of ambient light in the room, so it can adjust
Speaker 1: how much light it puts out to power the image
Speaker 1: on the screen based on the amount of light that's
Speaker 1: coming in the room, So it can kind of you know. Yeah,
Speaker 1: like if you if you watch television in the dark room,
Speaker 1: you don't need as much power to to make the
Speaker 1: image visible. So uh so watching, uh watching those movies
Speaker 1: in a nice little dark home theater system is of
Speaker 1: energy efficient in fact, so hey, I'm what do you know?
Speaker 1: I'm energy efficient because that's the way I prefer to
Speaker 1: watch my movies and television. Uh. And in the United States,
Speaker 1: the there's there's even a thing called energy Star. Now
Speaker 1: energy Star that's sort of a designation about if something
Speaker 1: has the energy Star label on it, that means that
Speaker 1: it meets certain standards which are constantly being revised, and
Speaker 1: by revised, they're usually getting better rather than worse, which
Speaker 1: is a relief in the United States. Really true true?
Speaker 1: Um yeah. As a matter of fact, there are a
Speaker 1: number of uh different kinds of ratings that you can
Speaker 1: get in addition to Energy Star, the manufacturers coalitions have
Speaker 1: put together some some different ones too. Um. But basically,
Speaker 1: if you can see the energy Star rating on the
Speaker 1: side of a box, you know that it is meeting
Speaker 1: minimum Environmental Protection Agency standards for uh, you know, energy usage,
Speaker 1: right and uh And as our article points out in
Speaker 1: two thousand seven, the Americans using energy Star products prevented
Speaker 1: forty million metric tons of greenhouse gases from entering the atmosphere.
Speaker 1: And that's that's that's significant. Yeah, that is that is
Speaker 1: fairly significant. UM. One of the ways one of the
Speaker 1: kinds of machines that use an awful lot of electricity,
Speaker 1: and a lot of machines aren't energy Star certified. Our computers,
Speaker 1: computer monitors, yes, computer monitors, depending on the monitor. A
Speaker 1: lot of the CRT s, the old style big tube monitors, those, um,
Speaker 1: those you use up a lot more electricity in general
Speaker 1: than you are flat panels. UM. But you know, we
Speaker 1: looked at several of the different machines out there, um,
Speaker 1: and there are some that are are starting to come down. Like, um,
Speaker 1: there's a new uh, a new computer offered by Cranberry
Speaker 1: that only uses nine wants of electricity And a story
Speaker 1: that has been in the news and set lately about
Speaker 1: the Cherry Poal, which is a kind of cloud computer
Speaker 1: very similar to the Cranberry and it only uses two
Speaker 1: wats of electricity. Right, it really cuts down the moving parts,
Speaker 1: you know, things like they get rid of things like
Speaker 1: the fan UH and hard drives, the spinning hard drives
Speaker 1: and that really helps cut down on power consumption. Uh.
Speaker 1: And of course we there are other things that we
Speaker 1: can talk about when we're talking about energy efficiency. We
Speaker 1: can talk about handheld devices and alternative means of powering them,
Speaker 1: like solar panels. For example. You could have a solar
Speaker 1: powered energy source to charge your iPod for example. True.
Speaker 1: And there's another example that we used, the Nokia Eco Sensor,
Speaker 1: which is a UM sort of prototype, I guess, And
Speaker 1: it uses a combination solar panel that you can wear
Speaker 1: on your wrist, but it's combined with a kinetic energy generator.
Speaker 1: So if you're, you know, waving your arms wildly like
Speaker 1: I am right now, UM, you can charge up your
Speaker 1: pd A as you are are gesticulating while they are
Speaker 1: making your friends wonder if you're insane. You go, no,
Speaker 1: I'm just charging my p A right. In a related story,
Speaker 1: I read a great in The Independent, as a newspaper
Speaker 1: in the United Kingdom, written by Adrian so about she
Speaker 1: She proposed a certain kind of energy generating piece of clothing.
Speaker 1: We're talking about a They call it the bionic bra. Uh.
Speaker 1: It's a bra that would harness the power of moving
Speaker 1: breasts to generate electricity um, which is a brilliant although
Speaker 1: as NPRS wait wait, don't tell me pointed out, that
Speaker 1: might mean that guys start referring to women by how
Speaker 1: long a song they'd be able to play. So if
Speaker 1: it powers down completely, do you get memory loss? Ha
Speaker 1: ha ha ha um. But to be serious, she was.
Speaker 1: She was asking actual engineers about the the feasibility of this,
Speaker 1: and some of them surprisingly said it's completely feasible. Uh.
Speaker 1: There was an engineer named Wong at Georgia Tech, which
Speaker 1: is just down the road from us, who his team's
Speaker 1: working on creating fabric made out of nano wires that
Speaker 1: can transform friction into electricity, so the more you move around,
Speaker 1: the more electricity you would generate. And he was thinking
Speaker 1: of using it in things like T shirts and stuff
Speaker 1: like that, you know, things that things that you would
Speaker 1: wear that you would you know, just have a lot
Speaker 1: of movement in general. And he said, bras are are
Speaker 1: a legitimate use for this technology. So we may actually
Speaker 1: see a broad generating electricity soon or not see it.
Speaker 1: I mean it would probably be under clothes, so we
Speaker 1: probably wouldn't actually anyway, you know what I mean. I
Speaker 1: feel like i've stumbled into some kind of booby trap. Yes,
Speaker 1: I would say, so, really it looks like, rather than
Speaker 1: you know, just looking at ways to cut down on
Speaker 1: the amount of electricity they use manufacturers, you're also looking
Speaker 1: into alternative ways to power that. So maybe through the
Speaker 1: combination of these things, we can reduce the load of
Speaker 1: electricity that we're using from from generating fossil fuels and
Speaker 1: are not generating fossil fuels. Generating electricity from fossil fuels.
Speaker 1: Right in the United States generates more than its electricity
Speaker 1: from coal, so that would be I would be a
Speaker 1: big improvement to find alternative ways of generating electricity. So
Speaker 1: now you'll shift from that to watching people, you know,
Speaker 1: flip and flop their way down the sidewalk as they
Speaker 1: go to work and try to listen to their iPods.
Speaker 1: I don't see this conversation getting any better. We might
Speaker 1: want to end this now. So if you're interested in
Speaker 1: reading more about that, we have a brand new article
Speaker 1: called how energy efficient Electronics Work. It's available today on
Speaker 1: how stuff works dot com. Thanks for listening for more
Speaker 1: on this and thousands of other topics. Does it how
Speaker 1: stuff works dot Com? Let us know what you think
Speaker 1: send an email to podcast at how stuff works dot com.
Speaker 1: Brought to you by the reinvented two thousand twelve camera.
Speaker 1: It's ready, Are you