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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Surge suppressors don't save
electricity
A company is trying to
sell me a surge suppression system (TVSS) for my
[commercial] building they say will reduce
electricity use by 20%. Is this B.S.?
-- Glynn Moran, Feb. 2004
Yes, it's B.S. It won't save any
electricity at all. Companies like RediVolt are
scam artists who have never substantiated their
claims. Sure, they guarantee the savings, but to
file a claim you have to do things like submit
daily temperature readings from the National
Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration for a
four-year period! Note that the link goes to an
affiliate site; there are lots of different
websites littering the net marketing the same
exact Redi-Volt product.
Let's explain what surge protectors are
and what they're not. Every once in a while
there's an extremely brief surge of power in
your electrical lines caused by things like your
refrigerator kicking in and equipment switching
at the power plant. These surges can damage
electronic equipment like computers. You can
protect your equipment by plugging it into a
surge protector, which diverts the excess
electricity to the ground. This kind of device
is called a TVSS, or Transient Voltage Surge
Suppressor.
But this doesn't save any meaningful
amount of electricity, because the savings
happens for only a fraction of a second. In
the case of a plug-in protector you don't even
save that, because the surge has already gone
through the meter and you've already been
charged for it. (Well, not really, because the
surge is so small it doesn't even amount to a
fraction of a penny, but if you could be charged
for it, you would have been.) The company
selling the sham TVSS system installs it at the
electrical panel so it keeps you from getting
charged from surges that come from the power
plant but not inside your own building. Even so,
like we said, the savings happens for only a
fraction of a second, so small you can't really
measure it.
Let's assume you had a 100% spike every three
hours and that it lasts a millisecond, which is
pretty long for a surge. (We're being generous.)
Three hours is 10,800 seconds. So:
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Without Spikes
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With Spikes
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* 10,800 seconds at 120V
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* 10,799.999 seconds at 120V, plus
* 0.001 seconds at 240V
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So that means instead of using 10,800
seconds worth of 120V electricity, you're using
10,800.001 seconds of electricity. Put another
way, every three hours you use an extra 0.001 of
electricity. Now, if you think that's a lot, do
you think you would save a lot of energy by
turning off your lights for 0.001 seconds? Do
you think you will pay a lot more for
electricity by keeping them on for an extra
0.001 seconds?
Here's what it looks like in graphical
form:
What? You say you can't see the surge? Oh,
it's there. It's just that it's only
0.00000000003 inches wide, so it's a little hard
to see. The table would need to be over 8000
miles wide in order for the surge to be
represented by a one-pixel line. I made the
chart smaller because I figured your monitor is
not that large.
By the way, this is the
same reason why the brief power surge that
occurs when you turn on things like computers is
meaningless -- it happens for a tiny, tiny,
tiny, amount of time, and the surge itself is
only modest. Think about it: If a device used
twice as much energy when you turned it
on for a full second, then it would cost
you a whopping one extra second of
electricity.
Please read that last sentence again, it's
important.
Remember the motto of our website: Volts x
Amps = Watts. Underwriters
Laboratories figures that a typical damaging
surge from lightning is 6000 Volts at 200 Amps
and lasts ten microseconds (ten millionths of a
second). So 6000 V x 200 A = 1,200,000 watts, or
1,200 kilowatts.
But the surge would have to last for an hour
for that to be 1,200 kilowatt-hours, and in fact
the surge lasts for only ten microseconds
(0.000001 seconds). Dividing our 1,200 kWh by
3600 seconds in an hour, then multiplying by the
0.000001 seconds the surge actually happens, we
get 0.00000003 kWh. It would take thirty
million of these surges to eat up a
kilowatt-hour, at which point you'd pay about
eight cents for it. And remember, this is for a
lightning strike; most surges are only a
few hundred volts.
Some boring tech background: Most surge
protectors clamp down on excess voltage above
330 or 400 volts. The TVSS making the claims of
20% energy savings says it clamps down at
anything over 130V. That will certainly protect
your equipment better, but again, it won't save
energy. Surges usually last for no more than a
few nanoseconds
to microseconds (a billionth of a second to
a thousandth of a second).
More about the TVSS energy-saving
scam:
More about surge suppressors
- Anatomy
of a Surge Suppressor by ExtremeTech
- How
Surge Suppressor work by HowStuffWorks
Incidentally, no surge suppressor you can buy
will protect against lightning, which can be
thousands or even millions of volts. But some
surge suppressors come with a warranty that
covers lightning damage, even though they can't
protect against it, because the manufacturers
are trying to get you to buy their product. They
know the chances of lightning getting into your
electrical lines is rare so their risk in
offering that kind of guarantee to you is small.
If you don't already have insurance to cover
your electronics equipment then buying a surge
suppressor that comes with a lightning guarantee
is an easy way to insure yourself.
Whether or not your insured (and whether with
real insurance or a product guarantee), the only
way to keep your equipment safe during a
lightning storm is to physically unplug it from
the wall. Turning it off isn't good enough, and
turning off the power strip it's on isn't good
enough -- there's enough power in a lightning
surge to jump the little gap that turns a switch
off. It's up to you whether you want to go to
the hassle of unplugging your electronics when
there's a storm. Me, I usually leave everything
plugged in and just make sure my computer data
is backed up.
My own experiences with TVSS scammers
One of the companies pushing RediVolt
illegally copied some of my energy saving tips
and put them on their own website, and then
ignored my requests that they remove my content
from their site (2002-03). They've since gone
out of business (or at least their website is no
longer up).
Damian Smith of TVSS scammer VoltTech.com
wrote in April 2004 to ask that I take down this
whole section about how TVSS's don't save energy
because I am supposedly wrong. Typically he
provided zero evidence to back his claims. I
told him that until he provides any evidence
then I wouldn't respond to any more of his
messages. He then threatened legal action
against me! I provided my address to serve their
lawsuit in case they were actually stupid enough
to file one.
By the way, VoltTech's site says that a fast
food restaurant or car wash experiences over
400,000 surges a day. Given that there are only
86,400 seconds in a 24-hour day, we're
expected to believe there are five surges
every second. Not.
VoltTech's site is littered with ridiculous
Java links and ugly bitmap graphics. It doesn't
exactly inspire confidence.
A letter we got on this subject
I can understand
your frustration companies that exploit the
unknowing public with smoke and mirrors and
delusions of power savings with the use of a
TVSS unit. I spent 25 years in the US Navy
and started their TVSS program to save ONLY on
maintenance costs and and to decrease equipment
down times, not to save energy. A TVSS
unit does not modify current usage therefore
doesn't save energy.
I have a TVSS /
consulting company which recommends TVSS for
things such as DC to 4160VAC. For those of us
who tell the truth I applaud you!
Steve Salka, VP
PhaseFree Inc., Feb. 2006
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