Another way you can quickly find big offenders is by using an infrared camera. I found various things in my house that are putting off a ton of heat when doing nothing (and using electricity to do it). My 10-year-old speakers with a built-in amp, for example, absolutely glow on infrared even when sitting there inactive 98% of the time. Now they are on a switch.
It's quite easy to use too: if something is warm when you touch it, it's burning through watts. If you expected it to be sleeping, it's either not sleeping or it's very bad at it. Don't forget the AC adapters, they can be worse than the devices they supply.
Heat pumps are more efficient than they used to be (at some point the outside air is too cold for them to work efficiently), so the cold climate where I'm from is just now starting to see them included in new homes.
It doesn't feel right to talk about the "efficiency" of a heat pump system; talk of "1W in gets you 3W out" isn't right, because you didn't magic those 3W out of thin air. It's more like "4W in gets you 4W out". It seems wrong to say that a heat pump system is "400% efficient".
I thought efficiency was a measure of how much of the work[0] going into a machine is transformed into the intended output work. I suppose you could say that this heat delivery machine is inefficient if a lot of the input work is expended on producing torque, or raising heavy stuff. But even that eventually turns into heat; just in the wrong place.
[0] I hope I'm using "work" and "machine" in the technical sense, so that "work" means displacement against a force, and a "machine" is any device for converting work from one form to another. Effiency is well-defined for that kind of machine: it's just the ratio of work in to work out, the output being what you want; so "efficiency" intrinsically depends on what your intentions are for your machine. .
Those 3W didn't come out of thin air, it came from outside air.
1W of energy going into the heat pump causes 4W of heat energy to get moved from outside your house to the inside of your house.
That's the key thing to take note of. Traditional resistive heating works by turning electrical energy into heat energy directly. Heat pumps move heat energy the same way an A/C unit does, it just moves it the other way.
Essentially, a heat pump is just an A/C unit with the evaporator and the condenser flipped.
No magic, but you are pulling those 3W out of the outside air.
You can use the industry term 'Co-efficient of performance' to avoid any possible ambiguity, but it's just the same thing with a different name.
The key is the Coefficient of performance https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coefficient_of_performance
However, consider the greater performance scales with generators combined with the amount of useful heat that one gets out of a heat pump can be better than converting the natural gas to heat locally - even with losses on the grid.
The key is that a heat pump doesn't convert electricity to heat (as a resistive heater) but rather moves heat from one spot (outside) to inside with great efficiency.
There's lots of ways to heat homes in ways which use way less than 1 joule of electricity for 1 joule of heat.
A PC under your desk will keep your toes warm, and maybe with warm toes you don't really mind the rest of the house being at 10 C / 50 F. With such space heater, you can turn down the thermostat for the entire house and only heat the parts you care about most. Furthermore there are radiative space heaters which direct infrared energy to a specific part of the room using a reflective dish, instead of heating the entire room using convection. In large rooms, radiative space heater can keep you feeling warm while using much less energy than a heatpump would require to heat the whole room.
I've found the IR camera works much better than my hand for things like switching power supplies. They'll be glowing in IR while being cool to the touch even when no device is plugged into them. While each might not be a ton of power I tended to just leave them plugged in all the time.
But there are other things around as well. My old laserjet printer was another offender.
That is going to vary a lot depending on the TV. I suspect a lot of modern "smart" TVs consume a measurable amount when idle.
i had the opposite, i had to disable the low power standby (which was on by default) so i could wake it over the ethernet or via HDMI-CEC
Are there any affordable cameras that are not completely trash? Low resolution is ok.
An infrared camera is great for tracking down and fixing insulation problems in your house, if you own a home. And fixing insulation issues really brings down your heating/cooling bills.
If you don't own a home the value proposition is a lot worse, but $200 or so still isn't bad for something that amounts to a fun toy.
EDIT: Sorry, it was $380 before Amazon points. I should have clicked into the invoice.
Morally it’s not exactly solid but at least you’re not standing on the backs of the poor to be a billionaire and all that
Many people struggle to understand this concept. In some climates and energy grids, switching from things like incandescent to LED causes a greater environmental impact. It may shift (and may have already) as LED production gets more efficient.
Even for those who can, it would take several years for the investment in a heat pump plus the waste of the old heating system to become carbon neutral, let alone cashflow positive.
Don't feel bad. This entire thread is filled with people who think they know better. Must be why UX is in such high demand these days.
I get the enthusiasm though, head pumps are really neat.
You sure it's drawing 700W? Are you running multiple GPUs or what? Is that a server? Have you measured?
Someday if I ever get to build a custom house, I plan to install a full 42U rack that is tied into the houses central air to optionally heat the house with the waste heat.
But not only is the efficiency rating important but the specific model’s efficiency curves at cold loads and hot loads, 20%, 50%, and 100% loads. Paying attention to your components and what level of power usage they will be at for most of their usage will dictate what the most efficient specific model of power supply (at a reasonable price point for you). This of course makes reviewing and purchasing power supplies quite complicated.
Many people, especially in mid-tier or lower builds where every dollar for price vs performance has been calculated to the decimal point will opt for the cheapest power supply that meets the wattage and connector requirements their particular build requires, efficiency and longevity be damned.
My opinion is that getting a guaranteed 80% power conversion efficiency rating (as compared to, say, a 75% conversion efficiency rating) on a 500 watt PC will save you 25 watts of power over the years that you use it, plus a manufacturer that actually goes through the process of getting the approval will probably have also put a little extra care into their manufacturing process and so probably has a better reliability rating than one that did not.
Unless you are scraping to get any PC together it may well be worth an extra $10 in price variance, all other things being equal, for that piece of mind and minor electricity savings to boot.
I went out of my way to research my current power supply to make sure that given my usage and components, it would operate in peak efficiency (I believe mine is at nearly 95% efficiency at average load, would need to measure it more thoroughly, it has been a few years).
I feel a power supply is like tires. They are the only thing that actually touches the road(electricity). They are worth paying for something halfway decent, not bottom of the barrel.
I do agree, but I would be shocked to see a non-80+ psu at a reputable store like Micro Center.
https://www.newegg.com/p/1HU-0027-00010?Item=9SIAXE5EGG6813&...
650 watt, no-name non-80+ power supply for $40. That's the sort of thing I'm talking about. There are 80+ rated power supplies in the same price range or 80+ from reputable companies for $10 more but it's still a thing worth looking for when you're a newish builder or if you have any concern for the overall efficiency of your computer.
After all, base 80+ rating still means that for every watt your PC actually gets to use you're converting .2 watts directly into heat. That's not a big deal for a workstation that may only draw 100 watts under load but if you have a beefy PC with 3090s and an overclocked 12 series i9 processor with a lot of fans, you could be burning 100 watts or more just to power the thing, so it would definitely be worth it to go for gold or platinum 80+ rating just to save the money in waste heat and in cooling that waste heat after the fact.
But for a huge number of people (probably the majority) who live in more temperate climates (most of Europe and the US), they are a net win both in their energy bills and environmentally marginal extremely cold climates. That's the people whom LEDs target, not the people in marginal extreme cold climates running high power-draw servers in their homes.
How would that be the case?
I still like the heat pump because in the summer my power bill for cooling a 2600 sq ft home is about $50/month, and in the winter I do have a wood burning stove that I can run to heat the house when the temps are below 36. That and recirc mode on the fan unit can keep my power bills to a minimum.
Year round? So you mean the polar regions? Because they can work even at -10F. Efficiency is reduced, but they can work. Crappy ones will cutoff earlier though. If you are not in one of the planet's poles, we have seasons so it's better to use LEDs for at least 3/4 of the time (maybe more as even northern latitudes only have a few really severe winter days).
Modern LED lamps are tiny and use very little material. Incandescent bulbs are no longer considered 'exotic' because of how old the tech is, but tungsten was a very exotic material at some point.
That's the point where I'd strongly consider cryptocurrency mining.
Switch to LED and your heating system will need to supply that extra 0.5kW.
In a climate where you are almost always running heating, this makes the benefit of switching to LED much smaller, and considering that they are much less environmentally friendly to produce, it may even tip the scale the other way.
Depending on where the bulbs are located, they may be emitting into a ceiling cavity that exits the building's envelope more quickly than the location of the heating coil. Some bulbs are actually outside the building.
And of course, the heating system can supply 0.5kW for less than 0.5kW of power with heat pumps or (net including generation and transmission) natural gas.
Beyond that, heat pumps are still much more efficient than direct electric heating.
Also, if you have air conditioning at any point in the year, those incandescent lights are just going to make your air conditioner work that much harder.