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from the resist-the-urge-to-get-amped-up dept.
According to the National Resource Defense Council, Americans waste up to $19 billion annually in electricity costs due to "vampire appliances," always-on digital devices in the home that suck power even when they are turned off.
But University of Utah electrical and computer engineering professor Massood Tabib-Azar and his team of engineers have come up with a way to produce microscopic electronic switches for appliances and devices that can grow and dissolve wires inside the circuitry that instantly connect and disconnect electrical flow. With this technology, consumer products such as smartphones and computer laptops could run at least twice as long on a single battery charge, and newer all-digital appliances such as televisions and video game consoles could be much more power efficient.
...
"Whenever they are off, they are not completely off, and whenever they are on, they may not be completely on," says Tabib-Azar, who also is a professor with the Utah Science Technology and Research (USTAR) initiative. "That uses battery life. It heats up the device, and it's not doing anything for you. It's completely wasted power."Tabib-Azar and his team have devised a new kind of switch for electronic circuits that uses solid electrolytes such as copper sulfide to literally grow a wire between two electrodes when an electrical current passes through them, turning the switch on. When you reverse the polarity of the electrical current, then the metallic wire between the electrodes breaks down -- leaving a gap between them -- and the switch is turned off. A third electrode is used to control this process of growing and breaking down the wire.
He did not get the memo--reducing vampire current is not what the Internet of Things is all about.
(Score: 4, Insightful) by AthanasiusKircher on Thursday October 27 2016, @03:20PM
The technology sounds potentially interesting, but is it really necessary to solve most cases where people WANT to limit "vampire" power usage?
I'm pretty sure 99% of these devices could get rid of the "vampire" power simply by having a physical switch to turn them off (or, in other cases, designing the circuit properly so the physical switch actually turns everything off). I have a DVD player I bought 15 years ago that has a physical power button which you need to push to click in if you want to turn it on. Yes, it also has a "sleep mode" that it will go into if you leave the switch in the "on" state, thus allowing you to turn it fully back on with the remote. But since I don't watch DVDs that often anymore, I almost always hit that physical power switch. (Actually, even when I did watch DVDs, I tended to hit that switch too... why pay the electric company money to power a sensor just so I can use a remote, given that I need to make physical contact with the DVD player to load and unload the DVD in the first place?)
Anyhow, it seems more and more devices are coming without those physical switches. Some have no "power button" at all. Others may have one, but it effectively just toggles between "on" and a form of "sleep," rather than turning the device fully off. In most cases, this seems to exist so you can just use your remote to turn the device back on. (And, as I said, some other devices just have poorly designed power supplies or circuits that keep running and drawing power for no reason when the switch is "off" -- these just need to be designed better.)
So, if we really want to stop a lot of this "vampire" power drain, shouldn't we just be encouraging companies to make sure there's a literal power switch? Isn't that a simpler solution? Many folks already do this by connecting such devices to a power strip, which they tend shut off when they're not in use.
In the use cases where you actually WANT to be able to turn on something with a remote or some other case that the device needs to drain some minimal "vampire" power, then the contention that "... it's not doing anything for you. It's completely wasted power" is false. It is doing something for you, e.g., providing a convenient "sleep" mode so you don't have to wait to boot up a device again or whatever.
Perhaps this tech can improve situations like that and reduce power drain during inactive times. But let's not pretend that this "vampire" power is completely "wasted" in those use cases -- what you're using that power for is to provide convenience.
(Score: 2) by Scruffy Beard 2 on Thursday October 27 2016, @04:34PM
The old-school policy for appliances was to unplug them when on in use. (Not sure of the exact reason, but may have had to do with more unreliable cords.)
I wonder if that will come back in fashion. I think it is unlikely, because nobody likes to crawl through a rats' nest of cables to unplug something.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday October 27 2016, @05:02PM
I'm guessing there are a variety of scenarios that all lead to "electrical fire". Bad circuit design, flaw in wiring insulation, appliances that can't handle a power surge, etc.
(Score: 2) by bob_super on Thursday October 27 2016, @05:51PM
Reasons I've heard from my parents for unplugging are : significant power drain even when off (leaky AC transformers), and lightning safety (a lightning strike within a not-so-short distance could start a fire).
(Score: 2) by VLM on Friday October 28 2016, @12:03PM
lightning safety
My parents did that in the early 80s with the very earliest home computers.
Ironically a decade (or more?) pre-ATX power supplies, "off" meant an airgapped switch of probably higher quality than a $5 all plastic (including the ground "conductor" power strip. Also a lightning strike that just said "whatever" to an air gap of 2 miles or so isn't going to be very impressed by another quarter inch.
My recent experience is the most likely victim of lightning is insteon/x10 home automation components. Nothing more annoying that hearing a "bang" during a thunderstorm and the two year old automation switch you just installed is dead.
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Friday October 28 2016, @07:48AM
Over here we got to hear every year around December how important it was to unplug TVs because TVs tended to catch fire. Then somebody started wondering why are these spots only played in December, and looked at the statistics. Turned out that TVs did indeed tend to catch fire in December, the same time that everyone put Christmas decorations with lots of candles on top of their TVs.
That took the spots about TVs catching fires off the airs for a few years. Later the problem went away completely with flat screen TVs that are too slim to put a Christmas decoration on top of.
(Score: 2) by DECbot on Thursday October 27 2016, @05:24PM
I already have one power strip that I can use a remote to turn off the outlets. I've considered getting more for my entertainment center and such, but I haven't bothered yet because of cost.
Note to self: use the Kill-a-Watt on that power strip to test power consumption in the "off" state. Just how off is off and how much power does it take to listen to a remote? Maybe I just need to wire the outlet to a light switch.
cats~$ sudo chown -R us /home/base
(Score: 2) by Grishnakh on Friday October 28 2016, @04:20PM
You don't need to unplug things. If you want to really stop the "vampire" energy usage, you just use a simple power strip that you can get for $5. This has the bonus effect of giving you more outlets, since house-builders *still* haven't figured out that 2 outlets every 20 feet or whatever it is is never enough. They really should be putting in quad outlets (rather than double), and every 6 feet minimum, and every 3 feet in a kitchen. Until they do that, power strips are an absolute necessity. The switches on those might not be the very best quality, but usually they're just fine, and if one goes bad, you can get another strip for $5 so you might as well just stock up.
(Score: 1) by Scruffy Beard 2 on Saturday October 29 2016, @02:05PM
The code actually requires outlets every 12 ft. That way, 6ft appliance cords can reach without an extension cord. 6ft cords also prevent you from reaching a non-GFI protected outlet from inside the bathroom.
As far as I can tell, legally, extension cords and power strips don't really exist. If you read the fine-print on the package for a power strip, you will note that it is for "temporary use only."
(Score: 2) by Grishnakh on Monday October 31 2016, @03:39PM
6ft cords also prevent you from reaching a non-GFI protected outlet from inside the bathroom.
Not a problem in my house. The entire second floor is wired through a single GFCI outlet in my bedroom, including all the outlets in both bedrooms, all the bedroom lights, and the bathroom lights and outlets. The GFCI breaker does pop from time to time, leaving me and my housemates in darkness.
(Score: 2, Interesting) by GDX on Friday October 28 2016, @04:54AM
Today is possible to have a sleeping power off less than 2mW, 20mw if you add a led, for a cost of less tan 5$ and that don't add much to the price of most appliances. Well the cost in practice can go down to 1$ if some custom hardware is developed.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday October 28 2016, @07:55AM
It used to be possible to get down to zero with a simple power switch. With some device. including PCs, most have the power button where the power switch used to be. The only "advantage" for most people is that they get to hold the power button down for eight seconds whenever Windows freezes.
Those of us who use Wake-On-Lan are the exception, not the norm.