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Protection from Geopathic Stress & Electro-Stress - Environmental Energy Products for the 21st Century from The Energy Store |
Make sure ‘off’ is really ‘off’! |
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So you have all these terrific devices around the house or office—the PC, the printer, the scanner, the various communications devices. If you leave them on, they will continue to use electricity quite unnecessarily, and continue to wear down your health. An older PC might consume $150 worth over a year. And a PC benefits from being shut off, for example, because the next session starts with an unfragmented memory (RAM), so it works more efficiently. If the PC has a power management facility, do use it to power the computer down, or ‘hibernate’ it after a specified time. When devices are on ‘stand-by’ power, they are certainly not off. These are usually the devices which have a remote, like the TV and increasingly all sorts of other things. Some of these devices are well-engineered and consume only milliwatts of power when waiting for commands, but most are not. They can suck up 30W or more even when idle or "off." Modern devices pull power from the mains 24 hours a day, year-round, and even when switched off, external AC/DC power supplies never stop drawing power. A few years ago the Lawrence Berkeley Lab in the US found that on average there were 19 appliances in the home using stand-by power. And if you must use an electric blanket, warm the bed off, then turn it off at the wall. Often using the nearby switch doesn’t actually cut the current to the blanket. The stand-by power bill amounts to a sizeable 9% of the whole bill. A fellow called Ryan Ferris decided to turn off everything he didn’t need in his home, and he found he cut his bill from $90 to $9 over 4 months. What’s more, he says, ‘I watch less TV now too.’ Over the course of a device's lifetime, the cost of all that standby power can actually exceed the cost of having the device on. The IEA estimates that each watt shaved from a unit's standby power measurement will save buyers $3 to $8 over the course of that product's life. Alan Meier, a staff scientist at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory who helped to spur much of the international attention on standby power in the mid-1990s, calculates that products can save an average of 3 watts through relatively simple reengineering. At government electricity prices, this comes out to a $10 average lifetime savings. Paying for this largely wasted energy won't bankrupt a household, but when multiplied by all the households in a country or continent, the numbers get real big, real fast. But unlike many other problems we face, this is a solvable one. In fact, it's already been solved; electrical engineers have the tools to save nations like the US billions of dollars annually and to reduce greenhouse gases while they're at it. The best news? The changes will cost almost nothing to implement. Let’s hope it happens. For not only does your pocket suffer, but so does your health, as all the vibrational effects accumulate and add to the load on your weary frame. The rest of this site explains how that happens.
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