life at Visible Energy

David and Lisa manned our table at the annual Stanford Cook Products Expo, where Silicon Valley most innovative companies are exhibiting on April 13th from 12-6pm. This is the second time Visible Energy has been an exhibitor and showing the WiFi UFO Power Center for the first time.

Stand-by power is a big hidden waste and it is more than just the wall warts associated with cell phones and small electronics. Every home theatre has for instance a Audio/Video Receiver that mixes video and audio from multiple sources and it is also an amplifier. Just one of such AV Mixers are using much more power in stand-by than all the wall warts you can have.

To show how severe this is and how you can eliminate stand-by power from an AV Mixer, I have connected one to the UFO Power Center demo in a home theatre. The diagram of the energy load during a 24 hours period obtained from the UFO, shows more than 60 Watts of stand-by consumption with peaks of consumptions of 100 Watts when turned on. Notice that the AV Mixer has been turned “off” from the remote control.

If the AV Mixer is used for four hours a day, we are talking of 1.2 kWhr of energy wasted in a day for the twenty hours in stand-by, or 36 kWhr wasted every month, more than $5 in a month at $0.15/kWhr. This is not a minor problem and to make things worse, the actual power switch that would actually turn “off” the AV Mixer is in the back of the enclosure. Since everything is neatly inside a shelf, reaching that switch would require to take the AV Mixer out and back in every time.

To kill the stand-by power from the AV Mixer in a transparent way, I connected the TV to the UFO as well. This is a modern TV that is using only a few Watts when in stand-by, most of the time less than 1 Watt. I have then given the role of “master” to the TV socket and the role of  “slave” to the AV Mixer. The UFO is now sensing power on the TV socket – once a second – and if the TV is turned on it will automatically turn on the AV Mixer socket.

The result of using roles with the UFO, associating the TV to the AV Mixer is shown in the new diagram. The stand-by power consumption of the AV Mixer has been completely eliminated. Other sockets can have “slave” roles and in this case, and if for instance a DVD Player is also powered by the UFO, it would make sense to associate its socket to the TV as for the AV Mixer.
In conclusion, using a UFO Power Center in a Home Theatre makes a big difference and it eliminates all stand-by power from essential components like the AV Mixer and a DVD Player, resulting in very substantial savings of energy and money.

Reducing electrical consumption of 100 Watt in a year corresponds to $150 of savings.

It is interesting that when associating a monetary figure to electricity saved, the result is a substantial saving even for a relatively small amount of energy reduction. After all, how many questionably useful 100 Watt light bulbs lie around our homes and offices? Knowing that keeping those lights always on cost $150 each in a year gives a different perspective on it.

With a UFO Power Center reaching a substantial amount of saving in the order of 40 or 50 Watts per socket is relatively simple, particularly when used in a home theater or home office setting and other posts in my blog are dedicated to this.

The equivalence of 100 W = $150 is clearly comes from the following calculation:

Number of hours in a year = (365 x 24) = 8,760

Energy saved by eliminating 100 Watt for 8,760 hours = (100 x 8760) = 876000 Whr = 876 kWhr

At the average cost of $0.18 per kWhr:

Money saved by eliminating 100 Watt in a year = (876 x 0.18) = 157.68

This is a concept already explored by another energy efficiency blog http://tinyurl.com/m7hmao

Today our EnergyUFO Power Center received the prestigious Ecohitech award presented to the most “eco-virtuous” technology product in Rome.

The award was presented today to Visible Energy and Sorgenia, the Italian electrical utility for whom the EnergyUFO was originally designed. Sorgenia will begin offering the smart powerstrip to its customers beginning in early 2011.

Sponsored by the Consortium Ecoqual’It, the Ecohitech Award has been given annually since 1998 and helps drive the development and acceptance of innovative technology solutions for saving energy. The award, Italy’s first national prize for energy efficiency, was presented during the LUMEN Technology Forum conference today in Rome.

“Sorgenia is honored to receive this award with Visible Energy,” said Mr. Riccardo Bani, Sorgenia’s General Manager. “Together, our companies will help Italian consumers see how their conservation efforts translate into immediate energy savings. We look forward to delivering the EnergyUFO to Sorgenia customers.”

Visible Energy and Sorgenia were recognized for their “design and realization of a product that will lead to reduced environmental impact and CO2 emissions and increasing energy efficiency beyond what is required by national and international regulations.

This is the first of a series of blogs showing practical uses of the UFO Powerstrip and how it saves electricity. As UFO Powerstrips become available and are being used for field testing, we will be able to report more practical examples. These blogs will show how counterintuitive sometimes electricity usage is.

Like most offices, we have an electric water fountain. Its power rating – like most electrical appliances – is not clear. We have used a UFO for a few weeks in our office kitchen and tried different arrangements. The water fountain is effectively a refrigerator and during this test we have not used it to pour hot water. Unlike home refrigerators, the water fountain does not have a way to adjust its temperature, leading to big wastes of energy.

When used without any restrictions, the water fountain uses per day in excess of 1.6 KWhr. That is just leaving it on all the time. We have experimented using the timer feature of the UFO Powerstrip and at first reduced it daily energy consumption to about 1 KWhr just by turning it off during the night. We then tried to be a little more clever and noticed that the water was at a cold enough temperature after turning it off for half an hour. We tried then to cycle on and off the water fountain every half hour. Interestingly, although the perception was the water was pretty cold, the refrigerator inside the fountain was still using about 70 W per hour in average, basically the same amount of energy used by keeping the water fountain on all the time.

What it really made a difference was to cycle the water fountain on and off every hour. We could still not perceive the difference but this way, we reduced the daily energy consumption to less than 0.5 KWhr.

In conclusion, we managed energy consumption of a very dumb office water fountain and reduced its daily electricity usage from 1.6 KWhr to less than 0.5 KWhr without any reducing its effectiveness.

At CES this year one could see different HAN technologies both wired and wireless all incompatible with each other. There are some compelling solutions and even proven ones. Among the communication protocols you could see HomePlug, WiFi, G.hn, P1901, ZigBee and ZWave.

Energy management does not need the bandwidth of broadband powerline solutions, nor their outrageous power consumption and cost (for the chips). We cannot afford 5W of standby power consumption just for the communication silicon alone (and the $10/chip they demand).

I have to express my personal dislike of proprietary solutions like ZigBee and ZWave and for their distasteful marketing operations. There are egregious standard 802.15 wireless technologies out there and using 6LoWPAN and IPv6 — the British company Jennic is probably my favorite.

I hope 2010 will be the year powerline G.hn will be available and with a much needed ‘smart-energy’ profile to allow chips that can communicate with high-bandwidth nodes but that trade off bandwidth for less power and cost. In the meanwhile, we are stuck with lower performance ‘CENELEC’ standard solutions, like the one offered by ST Microelectronics.