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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.
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"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: 2) by MrGuy on Thursday October 27 2016, @05:15PM
The odd thing is: there is a huge variance in the appliance. We have a couple of lasert printers in our home office: one consumes almost nothing in sleep mode (hard to measure, probably 1-2 watts. The other consumes 50 watts (!) in sleep mode - we try to remember to turn that one off. Stupid design? A manufacturer that doesn't give a shit?
There's a third option here, and that's convenience. Should we waste power to avoid wasting time? If so, how much is "worth it?"
With your laser printer example, laser printers need a heated fuser unit to melt the toner onto the page, which consumes a lot of energy (relatively speaking). I'd be willing to bet one of your printers powers down the fuser when it sleeps and the other doesn't. If that's correct, the more energy efficient one will be slower to print when coming out of sleep mode - it will have to heat the fuzer back up. Whereas the wasteful one can go right to printin'.
And, when you're looking at making a consumer level device, maybe you're more worried about complaints like "Gawd, this thing takes FOREVER to print!" from customers who only print occasionally, than you are about comments about the power consumption in sleep mode.
Another reason might be cost. You can usually get a lot more efficiency out of purpose-built circuitry that only does what you need it to than you can with general-purpose "off the shelf" components, but that's a potentially big investment. Also, even for pieces where you're working with pre-built components, it can often be the case that more power-efficient components are more costly than less efficient alternatives. Depending on what you're building, power-efficiency can be a big tax on your device.
If you can build a device that costs $50, or a device that costs $90 and is more power efficient, and your competitors are selling similar devices at $60, which do you choose to produce? Also, how long does it take for the additional power costs to make the extra cost of the more expensive device "pay for itself"?
That's not to say manufacturers always make long-term socially efficient decisions on either convenience or on cost - if my hypothetical lower-power $90 device saved you $30 a year in electricity, they really SHOULD make the more expensive one. But if people only look at the price, it's hard to succeed, even if the device is "better," because people aren't always rational.
That's not to say poor design/engineering don't sometimes (often?) play a role. But there are reasons for poor energy efficiency that are more nuanced by "they're bad at designing."