The clock on my range has never kept correct time, yet it keeps running and using electricity. (Small amount, but many little things like this can add up.)
So I pulled my electric range out from the wall, unplugged it, and disconnected the clock. (Only do this if you know what you are doing.)
I already have many electronic things on power strips and turn off the power strips when not in use. These things use electricity all the time...
Savings? Bah. Now you'll have to buy your wife a watch.
Watches are pretty much out of vogue as most people check their cell phones fro time. It looks like you'll have to buy her a new cellphone for kitchen work.
Electric consumption of any clock, sans lighting, is nearly negligible. Certainly compared to a ranges power use!
Jeff
Now.....you be SURE to disconnect the fridge lights, oven light, and rip out the range hood while you're at it.
Never knew about power strips...anyone care to dispute that?
If you can even measure the difference...
And, of course, by disconnecting the range clock you've also disabled the auto-on/off feature...
As an aside, it would seem quite unusual for a wall-sourced electric clock to not be pretty accurate since grid frequency is normally pretty precise.
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I think he's talking about electronics plugged into the strips, not the strips themselves
The clock in our old range stopped working 10 years ago but it was still right twice a day. New range has no clock, no electronics, no circuit board, just plenty of power to cook with.
OTOH, the clock in our (roughly 25 yr old) range still functions as accurately as any in the house (including the electric which dates from
1948 when we first got grid REA power). I'm quite certain my wife would not do w/o the auto-start feature and am even more certain she'd never accept black. :)--
Bill wrote
using electricity. (Small amount, but many
No they cant.
And if you dont have a clue about the cost of the electricity it uses.
strips when not in use. These things use
But if you use electricity for cooking, hot water and house heating, those uses will completely swamp the use by stuff like the range clock.
val189 wrote
He didnt say that the power strip itself uses any power, just that he uses power strips as a convenient way to turn off what isnt used all the time, most obviously plug packs/wall warts that so many of the smaller devices use now, and other stuff that isnt normally turned off when not in use.
On 6/1/2008 11:59 AM Rod Speed spake thus:
Yes, they can, and do.
Haven't you noticed that even the power companies themselves (like PG&E here) are running ad campaigns advising people to get rid of all those "phantom" electricity users?
A guy here at UC Berkeley has done research showing that all these things--wall warts, devices that power LEDs, etc.--use a trememdous amount of electricity when added up.
Hmmm, No kidding! But if the clock is disconnected can't do timed use of oven!
David Nebenzahl wrote
using electricity. (Small amount, but
Nope, not with an electric range where the time you have one of the plates on for has a MUCH more important effect on the electricity used.
are running ad campaigns advising people
They aint talking about the clock in a range.
things--wall warts, devices that power LEDs, etc.--
Pity that the clock in a range being discussed cant add up when there is only one of them.
And the range takes vastly more power when you turn one of the plates on so that completely swamps the power the clock uses.
...
How many people use the timer on an oven? What kinds of food can you leave in an oven for many hours without it going bad on you?
Anthony
On 6/1/2008 1:43 PM Rod Speed spake thus:
The fact that the burners use a lot more electricity doesn't change the fact that things like clocks, wall warts, etc., still use small amounts of electricity, and when added together constitute a significant fraction of energy usage.
The point is that if the clock isn't serving any useful purpose, then disconnecting it to save electricity (an admittedly small amount, but see above) is a good thing to do.
It's sort of hard to believe that it wasn't keeping correct time. Was there perhaps a "cook timer" function operated by a little knob in the center of the clock face? That's where the one on our stove's clock is, and if you don't do the cook timer setting function correctly you can advance the time on the clock.
Plus, you can't set the clock "backwards", so if you advance it say 10 minutes by clumsy setting of the cook timer the only way to reset the time is to crank the minute hand around almost twelve rotations, someting SWMBO never sees a need to do.
Some power strips do use power. To light up the little pilot lamp which indicates that the strip's switch is on.
I wonder (but am too lazy to calculate) how long that light would have to be left on to add a penny to your electric bill.
For sure, slow and steady always wins the race. In this case it is waste. People tend to focus on big things but it is the small wasteful or efficient things multiplied by hundreds of millions of users that really ad up. Those cheepo wall wart power supplies waste power in two ways. One is standby loss. Assume they loose a low 3W/each and you have
Then the cheepo power supplies are quite inefficient when powering a load. I have read that the waste is collectively over 50 billion kwh/year in the US.
Has anyone thought about how much wasted electricity we'd be saving now if the utilities could have forseen the eventual spike in energy cost and used heavier conductors for their runs?
I'd expect that the added cost of the copper or aluminum needed to reduce resistive losses in all those distribution wires by making them thicker would get paid off pretty fast at today's fuel costs.
(It's a good thing Edison didn't win out, or we'd still be distributing electricity at 110 volts DC throughout our power systems, with even greater transmission losses. )
Jeff
I don't believe ovens have had delayed start for a long time due to safety reasons but most have cooking length timers. We use ours all of the time mainly as a reminder when to remove the food. But it wouldn't be a major deal if it didn't have a timer because there are lots of inexpensive windup or electronic timers that could be substituted.
I'm quite certain my wife would
Interesting. I've never used an auto-start in my life, and have no idea why anyone would ever want to, and all my appliance are black :)
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