Energy Consumption by Household Appliances
Lot of discussion is available on Internet about power consumption by computers, TVs etc. Here is a good CNET Article about TV power consumption.
But it was interesting to read about power consumption by household appliances on this slashdot article.
Mostly what I read was in line with what I thought. Home heating and cooling is the biggest monster when it comes to power consumption. In fact according to wikipedia article about energy conservation, space conditioning roughly consumes 44%, close to half the total power consumed.
Insulate your house properly and it will work wonders on your electric bill.
Slashdot quoted text “So what were our apartment’s power hogs? The lights and the dryer. I estimate our lights cost us around $30 a month, nearly a third of that from a chandelier with eight bulbs. Then there’s the dryer. I don’t know exactly how many watts it uses, but estimate it’s costing us at least $25 a month.”
Look at this table of appliances power consumption. The figures are sort of approximate. Definitely there will be a big variation. But it is overall good table for finding which appliances consume relatively high power.
Electric dryer consumes a humongous 4KW/H.
So if you run dryer everyday about one hour, you are using almost 4 x 30 = 120 KWH. At 10c/ KWH, and taxes on top of that, you are running in about 12-15$ per month. If you are running biggerloads, runing dryer for more time, or running on high heat cycles, you might be spending north of $25-$30 per month just for drying your clothes.
Just for reference, home energy consumption average figures from wikipedia article,
- space conditioning, 44%
- water heating, 13%
- lighting, 12%
- refrigeration, 8%
- home electronics, 6%
- laundry appliances, 5%
- kitchen appliances, 4%
- other uses, 8%
Saving energy one load of laundry at a time. – You can cut your dryer out of the picture if you hang your clothes outside or inside. If you are unable to hang your clothes outside due to local laws you may want to check out http://www.laundrylist.org/advocacy/righttodry.htm and contact your legislator to pass laws that protect your rights to hang your clothes.
Or you may want to consider purchasing drying racks for inside use. Just think if everyone would hang their clothes out at least once a month
If only 500,000 US households dried one load a month for a whole year in lieu of using their drier for 1 hour:
At 4000 watts hr X 500,000 households X 12 months =
24,000,000,000 watts hr/year = 24,000,000 kw-hr/year
if 1.64 lbs CO2 /kw-hr then 1.64 *24,000,000 kw-hr/year=
39,360,000 lbs (39 million lbs) of CO2 that will not be released into the atmosphere each year.
References:
Dryer wattage:
http://www.absak.com/design/powercon.html
http://www.eere.energy.gov/consumer/your_home/appliances/index.cfm/mytopic=10040
lbs of CO2/kw-hr:
http://www.intel.com/technology/magazine/computing/dt07032.pdf
Clothesline products and info:
http://www.ecowashinglines.co.uk/home http://www.lifestyleclotheslines.com/site/1303324/page/45029
I’ve noticed that when I hang clothes to dry, I then have to iron them, whereas I don’t iron much that comes out of the dryer. I wonder how energy consumption from using an iron compares to that of using a clothes dryer.
Hello Katherene,
Cloths-iron consumes somewhere in the range of 700W to 1000 W electricity. And with the thermostat inside, the iron is heating up only about half the time it is in use. So even if you use 1000W iron for 1 hour, you are using about 0.5 KWH energy. The dryer which consumes about 4000W dryer which runs for 30-45 minutes, thus consuming about 2.o to 3.0 KWH energy. So clothsline + iron still wins hands down.
Yeah! I love to buy wash and wear style fabrics and hang them to dry. It just makes sence 2 me. My car gets 39MPG- a 2007 Yaris. All out TVs and Computers use LCD screens not CRT.
[...] it far more than offsets the amount of energy saved by switching off the lights. As shown in one of my previous posts, air conditioner is the biggest energy hog. The proportion of energy consumed by air conditioner [...]
Daylight Saving - Energy saving or energy wasting? « Saving Energy said this on March 6, 2008 at 12:13 pm |
I’m a student at Pomona College in Claremont, California and recently spent a good amount of time looking into clothesline and drying rack options since Pomona is going to purchase some for student use and I wanted to make sure we purchased the best available option.
In my research, I was amazed to find that there is no good website explaining all the different clotheslines and drying rack options. So, I made my own! It’s a wiki page on the Tip the Planet sustainable living wiki that anyone can edit. You can check it out here: http://www.tiptheplanet.com/index.php?title=Air_dry_washing
I’m trying to spread the word so that the site becomes a clearing house for drying rack information, and people have to spend less time scouring the web for the best products. Have a look, share it with your friends, and by all means add your wisdom!
Take care,
Chelsea
I agree with Keith, using a clothes line a bit more will save so much power for the average consumer in a year that its a wonder that anybody uses the electric dryers at all. According to http://www.qualityclotheslines.net ,where i bought my clothes line from, they say that a clothesline is about 50% cheaper to buy than an electric dryer anyway. In America the clothesline is considered “Low rent” by many people, but i think that people who use an electric model are environmental vandals if the climate is warm enough to use a clothesline.
Hi,
There are quite a few ways to save energy in the home. Have you taken a look at the new tankless water heaters. This is a new environmentally friendly technology that your readers should know about. They are good for the environment and can help people lower their energy consumption by about 35%.
Email me for more information on the new tankless at terri.daly@yahoo.com
Thanks!
Terri
Hi,
I’m student trying to come up with a product that will act as a power saver in irons.My product is like an extra fixture to the iron that acts as a timer to switch off the iron when left on unnecessarily.I’m sure that this happens to a lot of us, and i would like to know if there are any products out there already and if so how successful they are in saving electricity.
Thanks a lot!
Abdallah
I managed to save 8% off my home energy bills by using a laundry line to dry my laundry. There is a wealth of information out there on all sorts of way to save energy and become more environmentally friendly. A solar site that I found had interesting things and information on state rebate schemes was http://www.homesolarpowersystems.org and another site that had a lot of useful information about reducing home power consumption was http://www.lifestyleclotheslines.com.au If we can all do a small bit I will be amazing how fast we might be able to turn things around in this day and age.
Hi,
here (in url) is some project. We are trying to solve energy consumption issues. http://csidc.fiit.stuba.sk/2008/.
Interested?
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