Priority Interrupt by Steve Ciarcia Feel the Heat

When you buy a new car, you think about gas mileage, right? When you notice that one of your faucets drips constantly, you fix it, right? If there are lights on all over the house, you go around and turn them off, right?

I’d like to think we do all these things because we’re conservationists who want to save the planet, but I know the real reason is a bit more selfish. Certainly, if you don’t have a large family, or if you feel an incessant need to know you can squash other cars like bugs, there are saner and more economical transportation choices than a Hummer. Similarly, the dripping faucet gets fixed when the water bill suggests that using bottled water from the grocery store would have been cheaper than the city water utility.

I’m probably a bad example for the rest of the world, and I certainly can’t quite see myself roller skating or biking to work. In fact, if it weren’t for the electric bill, I could go on in ignorant bliss forever. Unfortunately, I made the mistake of asking how much it was. (My wife handles the personal finance stuff.)

The question was prompted after I walked out into the corridor behind the Circuit Cellar. It was 2 a.m., and I didn’t even need the lights to see where I was going. There were so many backlit LCDs, LEDs, pilot lights, and shimmering indicators and displays that the entire place glowed. There are a hundred LEDs on the HCS II I/O boards alone. Obviously, 20 years of tacking displays and LEDs on all my projects has caught up with me. As I walked back upstairs, the home control system switched lights on and off in each room. Eventually, I stood in the kitchen and looked around. Inside the house, the HCS II had a half-dozen bulbs dimmed to half brightness. Outside the house, it looked like a Wal-Mart parking lot. Whether for security, mood lighting, or just so our dog Katy doesn’t get lost in the dark, my home is what you’d call “well lit.”;-) Of course, long ago, I replaced the incandescent floods (that consumed thousands of watts) with more efficient sodium vapor lights, but there are still at least 10 outside floodlights on various duty cycles.

Just for the heck of it, the next morning I asked how much our average electric bill was, and my wife said, “It peaks a little more during the summer with air conditioning, but it averages about $300 a month!” Needless to say, I was shocked. We don’t have an electric water heater, electric stove, or electric heating. Should I get Katy a miner’s light, kill the floods, and tell her to fend for herself?

Electronic living is certainly more expensive than I thought. Even with electricity billed at 10.5 cents a kilowatt-hour in Connecticut, a few floods and corridor lights shouldn’t be doing all this. I could see maybe $50 a month for all these “nite” lights. Where was everything else coming from?

I decided to do a test. My house isn’t really a house; it’s more like a compound with five buildings (garages, greenhouse, etc.). Because it is so spread out, I actually have two utility service entrances (two bills totaling $300 and, as if that isn’t complicated enough, seven electric service panels). I decided to see what the quiescent current was for all this mess. At 4 p.m. (in late September), the heating and air conditioning systems weren’t running, and the inside and outside lights were off. I clipped my trusty AC ammeter on each leg of the 220-V service feeding the outside garages. It read approximately 1.5 A on each leg. I proceeded to the house and repeated the process. This time I read 3 A on one leg and 6 A on the second. Neglecting power factor issues, it looks like I’m burning over $100/month in Shutdown mode! 

I started looking around for the culprits. You’d be surprised how many there are. Down in the Circuit Cellar, the desktops were off, but everything else was plugged in and ready. The DSL modem and Wi-Fi sat there flashing away, and the router was consuming enough power to be at 106°. (It’s a long story why I know the temperature.) Without ripping out a bunch of power cords, I could easily presume that the HCS II stuff was good for a couple hundred watts with all the displays, indicators, and powered peripherals all over the network. When I turned around, I could see at least a dozen wall-wart power supplies for various electronic gadgets. Another power supply “growth culture” clogged more AC outlets a few feet away. Add to that all the battery chargers, humming UPSs, webcams, satellite receivers, and security systems—arrrgh! I hadn’t even gone beyond one room, and I could see a major problem with wasted power.

Obviously, there isn’t an immediate and easy resolution. For sure I have to do some triaging to prioritize my power leaks, but I can’t simply unplug everything without ending up back in the Stone Age. Life today demands that everything be connected, and by necessity, a lot of it is powered all the time. In my case, it just means I need a much heavier power cord than most people.