Posted on 08/07/2006 3:40:33 PM PDT by neverdem
Throughout the record-breaking heat wave last week, Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg used his pulpit to underscore the urgency of saving electricity. He repeated his advice like a mantra, urging New Yorkers to set their thermostats at 78 degrees, to keep air-conditioners on only when at home and to avoid using household appliances like washers, dryers and dishwashers during peak periods.
“If we want to keep the power going, we’re all just going to have to conserve,” Mr. Bloomberg said on Wednesday. “I’ve done it in my house. Please — I cannot stress it enough — do it in yours.”
That same afternoon, Consolidated Edison, which supplies power to New York City and most of Westchester County, recorded an all-time record use of 13,141 megawatts.
Hundreds of organizations, from Nasdaq to the Metropolitan Museum of Art, took steps to reduce consumption. The number of residents who cooperated is harder to measure.
Peter A. Bradford, a former chairman of the state’s Public Service Commission, said that appeals like Mr. Bloomberg’s, while laudable, do not result in durable reductions in consumption.
“Advocating efficiency in the long term is not the same thing as the appeal on the day of the crisis to turn down thermostats,” he said. “One requires long-term planning, budgeting and capital investment — efficiency in buildings being perhaps the clearest example. The day-of-crisis stuff is equivalent to what the coach can do once the team is on the field and falling behind. At that point your options are far more limited.”
One obvious reason for the strain on the network is that the number of energy-devouring devices continues to grow. In 1980, 14 percent of households had a microwave oven. By 1987, 66 percent did, and by 2001, the last year for which federal statistics were available, 96 percent had...
(Excerpt) Read more at nytimes.com ...
BUMP
You can't save your way out of the energy situation. It's definitely part of the solution. But that solution only has REAL value when the power being paid by the consumer is the REAL cost. Then, we'll see everybody doing what they can to conserve...and increase supply. Why? Because the market will drive the prices high enough for people to REALLY care.
Very true. I've seen more than one instance where people died for their respective positions and the REAL answer turned out to be a "both/and" solution.
Regarding your experiences with your father, Gold's question about the reason behind those fossils being there really grabbed me. "How could you take a forest and mulch it all up so that it is a completely featureless big black substance and then find one leaf in it that is perfectly preserved?" His explanation is quite compelling.
One other element in the discussion -- one that I did not see among the others on the webpage I linked to -- is the depth at which modern drilling techniques are allowing us to access oil deposits. I've heard numbers as great as 8 miles. Well, barring a violent upheaval of the crust that would have devastated all life on Earth, it seems hugely unlikely -- I'll refraing from saying "impossible" -- that any part of the crust that was ever a heavily vegetated portion of the Earth's surface could have been subsumed to such a great depth. Even in such an instance, that it could have also carried with it and retained the majority of the biomass that had grown upon it, seems vanishingly unlikely.
So, I think that the "both/and" answer is most probably correct.
Nitpicking! ;^)
How much more money would just turning it "OFF" when you leave for the night save per year?
Don't get me wrong, I use screen savers to, well, save my screen display from burned in ghost images.
That alone justifies the technology, IMHO.
But OFF is the answer, in most home and all non 24/7 business applications.
Compared to sleep mode, very little.
You could pick up those phones really well on a police scanner....still can with most cordless phones, despite what the box says
turn the power off at the circuit breaker! and get used to blinking clocks
LOL! No.
Only if you are temporarily generating your own power during a prolonged supply outage.
If you can't afford the electric bill, chances are you can't afford the electric "toys".
But often people do need to be reminded that convenience always has a cost associated with it.
And that waste is not a "virtue".
I "waste" money on my water heater.
My decision, and a convenience I deem personally worth the expense.
But I am aware of the cost/benefit ratio.
I am amazed at the number of people who are clueless.
I shouldn't be...
Some of those brands like Uniden and Casio were such garbage. I sold them by the thousands at the Northridge JCPenney, and took back nearly as many in returns. Anything that wasn't a phone company brand was basically junk.
My monitor (a not very new IBM (really Sony trinitron, rebadged) does turn itself off when told to do so by the computer. You can have Windows go into screensaver mode after an assigned period of time, and, you can also have it go into power-saving mode. You get to pick your option, i.e., turn off monitor, spin-down hard drives, put CPU into "sleep" mode, etc. You can even have it put the whole computer into "hibernate" mode -- that means it saves your entire memory to a "core dump" type storage, and then turns itself off. When you turn it back on, you're right where you were when it hibernated. (Even if you physically pull the plug out after going into hibernation mode!)
Nitpicking! ;^)
How much more money would just turning it "OFF" when you leave for the night save per year?
Don't get me wrong, I use screen savers to, well, save my screen display from burned in ghost images.
That alone justifies the technology, IMHO.
But OFF is the answer, in most home and all non 24/7 business applications.
I have my monitor turn off after 45 min. of inactivity. It really does turn itself off -- there is an audible sound when the relay shuts the power off to the computer.
Oh, you say? There must be some power being drawn, so that it can turn itself back on when so directed by the computer?
Yup. A few microwatts. How much power does your wristwatch draw? How long does its tiny battery last? The circuitry to "listen" for a "turn back on" signal is on a similar level. The amount of current it draws is miniscule.
Turning off ... ahem, "unplugging" applicances that draw wristwatch-level current is a pure-BS "feelgood" activity. It's something for the sheep to do to make them feel like they're doing something. Dig a hole, fill it in.
The amount of power you "save" by shutting your system down, as opposed to allowing it to sit there in power-saving/standby mode, will be MORE than wasted when you have the momentary power surge the appliances draw when you turn them back on.
In addition, the constant off/on/off/on cycling will cause a lot more stress to the systems than leaving them running.
But hey, screw all that. Run around like obedient little "greenie-lite" folk, pulling plugs, then plugging them back in, over and over. If everyone does it, who knows? Maybe it'll save enough power to keep a lightbulb running for ten minutes!
Lord Mayor Bloomie can have a special lightbulb display in City Hall Park. Once a month, he can have a big ceremony, where schoolkids parade by, democrat politicians give speeches (about how they'd like to punch out the next white guy they see, and, about the wunderz of unplugging and plugging and unplugging ad absurdium), and then, once the sun goes down, a lottery winner can hit the big switch, and turn the light on for ten minutes, to demonstrate the SAVINGS delivered by all the obedient little...
LOL!
I am so blankety-blankety-glad I moved OUT of The Bad Apple some 35 odd years ago!
Is it a Kodak Carousel? If so, 99.999999% of the malfunctions are due to a nylon "solenoid tip" (the tip at the end of the plunger) breaking down. It gets waxy and brittle, and then the two tabs snap off.
I used to be a professional photographer, and my slide projector died, and I can't afford to replace it with equally good pro equipment, and I can't get it repaired as it is SO old and obsolete.
The symptom is easy to diagnose. When you hit the slide advance button, instead of smoothly advancing to the next slide, the projector goes "clunk" (once!), and does nothing!
It's a $50 repair. At least, that's what it was back when I was in the business. Probably $75 or $100 now.
Or, you can buy the nylon tip, and the rivet that holds it to the solenoid plunger (or, salvage the old rivet), and replace it yourself. Total cost shouldn't be much over a dollar or so for parts. (It was well under a dollar when I was in the business.)
It's a bit of a bear to get it in, until you study the "guts" for a while, and discover that you DON'T have to disassemble the whole mechanism to replace it. You only need to pull off the bottom plate from the cabinet (a few screws), and then wiggle the old one out, and the new one in.
I always viewed that as perfect obsolescence (from a manufacturer's perspective). Sell a product that's built like a Sherman Tank, with ONE single-point-of-failure, with that failure mode guaranteed to stop it dead in its tracks, motivating the owner to either pay a lot to repair it (flat rate at the factory), or, pay a lot to replace it. With scads of carousel trays filled with slides, the owner is pretty much of a captive customer either way.
Some of those brands like Uniden and Casio were such garbage.
Well, that depends on the model.
Uniden's second generation 900 MHz DSS phones were the apex of cordless phone design. Not only can't you hear them with a scanner, but you can't even find them with a frequency counter! They frequency-hopping is so rapid that the counter can't latch onto it, and even IF a scanner could, all you'd here would be "digital noise" (and then, only a portion of it -- whatever one of the numerous "hop-stops" you landed on).
They're probably good for two miles or so if you've got the base on an upstairs location and flat land. Here, with the base on the ground floor, and hilly land, with buildings blocking the signal (as well as tons of rock and dirt in the hills), we get about a half mile.
The newer phones, from what I've heard -- the "gigahertz" models, not only send half the duplex circuit in "cleartext" FM, but, due to the nature of microwave propagation, have much shorter range, and don't go through walls nearly as well.
To give something of a benchmark, our Uniden phone has more range than our "old" Cherokee FRS radios. (They were the only FRS radios that gave an actual half-watt ERP. The actual transmitter output to the antenna was on the order of .8 watt. Legal, since the FCC regulates ERP. Everyone else went with .5 watt output, and the ERP out of the little untuned antenna was much less. They weren't on the market all that long, probably because they used a standard UHF connection for the antenna, which was not legal. FRS radios have to have permanently attached antennas.)
Anyway, there were indeed some very good cordless phones available (still are, on the used market), with really amazing range, and true privacy via two-way digital spread spectrum.
Here are the two opening sentences:
For many years now, I've been shutting off my computer at night. But I'm now convinced you can leave your computer on at night and still conserve as much energy.Is 7.3 watts zero watts? No. Do computers or monitors use zero watts when they are switched off using their on/of switches? No. Is five watts "a few microwatts"? No.If you're a Windows user (Windows XP, Windows 2000, Windows Me), just set up your PC to 'hibernate' overnight. 'Hibernate' powers down your monitor to about 5 watts of energy and your PC to 2.3 watts -- virtually the same as turning your PC off...
Screen savers do not reduce your power consumption, and they are rarely necessary to protect modern monitors from image burn in. They aren't really "screen savers" anymore, they just look pretty and conceal your underlying display from snoopers.
I see lots of 'em on ebay, some at very attractive prices. Other than that, do you know offhand if the power resistor you mention is used for the transport motor, or the autofocus motor (or maybe the whole shebang?) (It's been a while since I've worked on 'em.)
Carousel 750, but it's not the solenoid tip, or at least not only the tip. There is a large ceramic power resistor on the motor, and that has flaked off much of the insulating ceramic, including the markings, and there appears to be a lot of corrosion and such in it. Since I lived in Florida, South Carolina, and Germany after I got it, and it spent a lot of time in storage and on ships crossing the ocean, I think it's toast. I keep an eye out in thrift shops for another one, though. Of course I've been carting it around since the early 80's. It's quite possible all the thrift shop Carousels are gone, by now.
I can try to find my fiches and see what they say about it, or, I can get on the line with some guys still in the trade and ask some questions. I wouldn't doubt that one of 'em would either know the value of that resistor, or, be willing to take a VOM to one to measure it for you (or, sell you one for a reasonable price -- shouldn't be more than a buck or two I'd think).
One other "slick obsolescence 'feature'" I remember is the B&H "cube" projectors. They used a *tiny* "fusible link" in their transport motors. Looked like a small metal diode, and was laid right on top of the windings. The idea was that if the motor overheated, the link would melt (internally), and the thing would shut down to prevent damage.
Of course, they tended to blow for "no reason at all", and, just to make life interesting, they only shut down the motor, so, I ended up replacing a lot of melted shutter blades (two that closed in on each other between slides), that didn't like an environment with a HOT lamp, and NO cooling! LOL, "engineering", LMAO!
The heat-fuse was an easy replacement, IF they brought the thing in before they roasted the rest of the projector. I think it cost a buck or so, you can buy them from pretty much any electronic parts supplier. Lots of things use 'em. I don't think Kodak put anything like that on their motors. I never saw one in that condition.
They don't make Carousel projectors anymore, which IMO is a bit of a tragedy. They were real workhorses, very reliable, gentle on the slides (gravity feed, unlike the side-feed straight-tray types, which, if anything went wrong, would destroy your slide while trying to insert it into the projector). Properly maintained they ought to last a lifetime. If parts ever do become an issue for you, well, that's what "broken projectors" are for. Nothing like a nice "donor body" or two to keep on hand.
PS: If your projector seems to be working (i.e., the motor powers up when you turn it on), but it doesn't operate when you press the advance button, then it's pretty much got to be the solenoid tip. (Sure, it could be something else, i.e., a burned-out solenoid or somesuch, but I've never seen one.)
Actually, the only reason it even draws that minute amount of current is because that's what it draws when it is "off" (and the amount of course will vary from one make/model to the next). Frankly, if anything those figures seem high to me for actual hibernation mode.
'Hibernate' powers down your monitor to about 5 watts of energy and your PC to 2.3 watts -- virtually the same as turning your PC off...
Once you put your computer into "Hibernate" mode, you CAN unplug it -- and it will still come back to the exact desktop state you were in when you hibernated (i.e., your applications will be loaded, documents open, windows exactly were you left them, etc.)
Now, there is a sort of "intermediate" mode between fully powered-up and shut down via "hibernate" mode. This is called "Standby" mode. The computer is still running, but, at greatly reduced power (making the figures above seem more realistic). The CPU is slowed down to a snail's pace (just enough horsepower to know if "something happens", such as a keystroke or other "wake-up NOW!" signal), the hard drives are spun down, and so forth.
For "standby" mode, you do need to keep the power plugged in -- and, the system will "wake up" nearly instantly when you strike a key (or whatever). When you put it into hibernation, though, it has to go through the boot process, but, it goes pretty quickly, since once it gets past the bootstrap loader, all it needs to do is "undump" the previous RAM contents off the disk and back into memory (and, a tiny bit of "housekeeping").
I regularly "hibernate" because we have frequent lightning storms, and I'm sick and tired of replacing hardware. So, I hibernate, pull the plugs, and go read a book. When the storms pass, I reverse the process, and I'm right back where I started.
And I'll bet if you used 0 electricity you would still owe something.
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