Mr. Electricity is your guide to saving energy in your home.
We're recommended by the government of Berks County, PA.
Related sites:
Watt Watt. News about efficiency and conservation, written by readers of the site.
Home Power Magazine. All about renewable energy for the home.
Thin House. Blog about a family committed to cutting its energy use by 80%.
No-Impact Man. Blog about a family striving to have no net impact. (i.e., What little they use, they offset.) Inspirational.
Off-Grid. News and resources about living without being connected to a utility company.
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If you like this site, you might also like some of my
other sites:
Battery
Guide
Which battery is best? We cover
rechargeable and alkaline batteries to show you what's hot,
what's not, and the best way to charge them. (visit
now)
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The
Military Budget as Cookies
This excellent animation from TrueMajority shows in
graphic detail (using Oreo cookies) how ridiculously, large
the military budget is, and how we could solve many domestic
problems with a modest 12% cut. A must-see. (watch
it now)
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Questions about saving
electricity in commercial buildings
Your site is mostly
geared towards home users. How can we save
electricity in our
factory?
Crystal Stockton, Glasgow,
KY
The main kinds of things that save
electricity at home also save money in the
factory or office:
1. Use natural lighting where
possible (e.g., windows, skylights), and
where it's not use T-8 fluorescent lighting.
2. Use ceiling fans where practical so you
can raise the AC temperature.
3. Turn off anything that's not being
used..
4. Turn off computers and other equipment
at night if no shifts are running. If
employees can't be counted on to turn off
equipment, put them on timers. This will save
not only on the equipment that's turned off,
but AC costs will go down because you won't
be paying to remove the heat generated by the
unused equipment.
5. Don't cool the building too much at
night when no shifts are running. If you
thought you needed to keep your computers
super-cool, you don't: You'll spend more to
keep the equipment cool then it would cost
you to replace the equipment a hair sooner
than you'd have to replace it otherwise. The
lifespan of computers is pretty short,
anyway; you'll likely replace your equipment
long before it breaks.
For any but the smallest business, it may pay
to have an audit performed. You have three
choices for audits:
- Many utility companies provide such
audits for free. Call yours to see if
they do.
- Hire a professional. For example,
one company in the Dallas area is LPG
Energy Consultants.
- Do it yourself. Check out books
like Handbook
of Energy Audits and Retrofitting
for Energy Conservation.
EnergyStar.gov has calculators which let you
compare
your business energy use per square foot to
other similar businesses, and calculate the
savings from installing EnergyStar
air conditioning systems. And below is a
book review I found which may be helpful.
Update, July & September 2008: I
just came across a couple of excellent resources
for saving energy in business.
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Retrofitting
for Energy
Conversation
(book by Bill Clark)
- This is a projects-oriented book
with each chapter covering a major
building design area: plumbing, HVAC,
architectural, lighting, electrical,
central plant, and controls. The
coverage is thorough but not overly
technical. The book is targeted at
energy auditors, facility managers,
consultants, and contractors. It's a
current, state of the art coverage of
the most effective energy conservation
projects and how they can easily be
incorporated into either new or
existing construction.
The presentation is biased toward no
cost and low cost projects, many of
which can be implemented as part of a
regular maintenance schedule. The key
is to know the engineering capabilities
that are available with the various
building systems, and to specify that
they be included in the installation.
There are literally hundreds of such
design alterations in each of the
engineering disciplines that can be
implemented with ease to create a much
more energy efficient facility.
Several appendixes are included. A
example energy audit of a commercial
building is done, complete with a cover
letter and project summary tables as
can be submitted to the client. There
is also a section of over 200 of "BTU
Bill's Energy Tips" (from my long
running radio spot by that name) that
can be applied in any circumstance - at
home, or at the workplace. A suite of
commercial quality computer programs is
available from Bar X Software, free
with proof of purchase. They include
peak and annual loads, bin analysis,
and lighting design. Order instructions
are in the book. This book is also
available in Spanish.
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How many watts does a
480-volt to 208-volt 225KVA transformer use when no
load is being pulled (i.e., transformer is powering
nothing, just sitting there humming).
-- E. Thayer, Wauseon, OH,
Dec. 2004
Depends on the transformer. Best bet is
to check with the manufacturer.
How much electricity do
I save by walking up the stairs vs. taking the
elevator up 3 levels? How much extra electricity is
used by each additional person in the elevator?
-- Philip Maynard, University of
California, Berkeley, 6-01
Elevator energy use varies a lot
according to many factors:
- The number of people in the elevator (and
their total weight)
- The capacity of the elevator (regardless
of how many people are actually in it)
- Whether the elevator is going up or down
(assumed)
- The system employed by the elevator
So your question, as you put it, is pretty
much unanswerable. It's like asking, "How much
gas does my car use?" The answer is going to
depend on a lot of factors.
I contacted Otis, the largest elevator
manufacturer in the world, to try to get figures
for energy use under sample situations
(10-person car; 1 floor of travel in each
direction; 1, 5, and 10 150-lb people in the
car) but they were less then helpful. The person
who responded was actually fairly snotty, and
insisted that nobody at Otis had information
about the electrical use of their products.
That's a pretty stupid answer -- you can't
design a commercial elevator without figuring
how much energy it requires, and obviously Otis
engineers made these calculations as part of
their design process. But since Otis insists
that they're ignorant about their own products,
we'll have to look elsewhere.
Search engines aren't much help. I found one
page on the National
Park Service website which claims that the
average office elevator consumes "350 watts" of
electricity to travel one floor. But that
statement raises more questions than it answers.
First of all, is that 350 watts, as they
stated, or 350 watt-hours, which is what
we expect? I'm guessing watt-hours, but we can't
be sure. Their answer also doesn't give the
values any of the variables we mentioned
above.
Since my initial inquiry to Otis I notice
that their New Zealand website has an elevator
energy calculator, but it's far from
user-friendly. For starters, it assumes that
each user takes two trips per day and that each
trip equals half of the total number of floors,
and you can't change these values. Also, it
doesn't give you any clue how many people it
assumes are in each car for each trip.
The values I entered were:
- 10-person capacity
- 10 people total in building
- 8 stops
- 1 elevator
- Office building
I couldn't enter in just 1 person in the
building because the results given are in kWh
per month, and one person alone wouldn't use
enough electricity to get any meaningful
results.
Based on what I entered, here's what Otis'
calculator said:
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System
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Age of Technology
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Electricity Used
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Gen2 (latest)
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latest
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9 kWh/mo.
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Variable Frequency
controller
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current
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12 kWh/mo.
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Hydraulic
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(not specified)
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17 kWh/mo.
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AC controller
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old
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17 kWh/mo.
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DC controller, gearless
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old
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16 kWh/mo.
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DC controller, geared
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old
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19 kWh/mo.
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Unfortunately, without knowing how many
people are in the car, we can't know how many
trips the elevator took, and we therefore can't
calculate the energy used per trip.
I made another inquiry to Otis but not
surprisingly I haven't heard back from them.
They're not especially helpful.
Update: At long last, Otis finally
replied to my second inquiry [Robin Fiala,
Senior Manager, New Equipment], but this
time all they did was send me a marketing
brochure that didn't answer any of the questions
I asked. I can't say I'm surprised. I then asked
if they would actually read my inquiry
and respond to it, to which they demanded to
know why I wanted the information I was asking
for. (They hadn't bothered to follow the link in
my message to this page.) I pointed out the link
to this page to explain why I'm looking for the
information, but after my previous experience
with Otis I'm not holding my breath.
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