Gibson HomeBuilders

Today’s topic What Is Watts In a Home.

My guest today is Jean Gibson, Vice President of Gibson Home Builders, Inc.
Watt (W)
Electric measurement of power at one point in time, as capacity or demand. For example, light bulbs are classified by wattage. (1000 watts = 1 kilowatt) unit of power equal to volts x amps.

Kilowatt (kW)1000 watts. A unit of measure of the amount of electricity needed to operate given equipment. For example, one kW is enough power to illuminate 10 light bulbs at 100 watts each. (volts x amps = watts)

Ampere (Amp) 
The unit of measure that indicates how much electricity flows through a conductor. It is like using cubic feet per second to measure the flow of water. For example, a 1,200-watt, 120-volt hair dryer pulls 10 amperes of electricity current. (amps = watts/volts)

Energy Hogs
5000 watts Electric oven
5000 watts Clothes dryer (electric)
3800 watts Water heater (electric)
3500 watts Central Air Conditioner (2.5 tons)
1500 watts Microwave oven
1500 watts Toaster (four-slot)
900 watts Coffee maker
800 watts Range burner
500-1440 watts Window unit air conditioner
200-700 watts Refrigerator
60-100 watts Light bulb (energy hog because houses have lots of lights, and it's easy to leave them on when they're not being used)
Fans
100 watts Floor fan or box fan (high speed)
15-95 watts Ceiling fan (Bigger fans and faster speeds use more energy. My 2004 42" Hampton Bay uses 24/28/42 watts on low/med/high respectively, according to the manual. Progress Energy says on high speed fans use 55/75/95 watts for 36"/48"/52" models respectively.)
Computers (see more about electrical use of computers)
140-330 watts Desktop Computer & 17" CRT monitor
1-20 watts Desktop Computer & Monitor (in sleep mode)
120 watts 17" CRT monitor
40 watts 17" LCD monitor
45 watts Laptop computer
Other
60-100 watts Regular light bulb
4-165 watts Video game (While playing game, 30W for PS2, 70W for XBox, and 165W for XBox 360. See full report at DX Gaming)
55-90 watts 19" television
18 watts Compact fluorescent light bulb
4 watts Clock radio
3 watt-hours Total power stored by an alkaline AA battery. This is to put batteries into perspective. If you could power your clock radio with a AA battery, it wouldn't even last an hour. We have more on batteries on our Guide to Household Batteries.

I work at home so I don’t use fuel to commute and I am replacing incandescent bulbs in my home with energy-efficient fluorescent bulbs.

The more devices I check on, the worse it gets. A TiVo digital video recorder was sucking down about 30 watts when it was not playing or recording a show. A Comcast digital cable set-top box made by Motorola was drawing about 40 watts. DVD players draw 26 watts while idle, and my audio system — which I rarely turned off — was using 47 watts. This was in addition to the numerous power adapters and chargers, each drawing 1 or 2 watts, not to mention several other devices sipping energy to keep clocks running or to be ready to turn on at the push of a button.
Indeed, the Department of Energy estimates that in the average home, 40 percent of all electricity used to power home electronics is consumed while the products are turned off. Add that all up, and it equals the annual output of 17 power plants, the government says. In an effort to address that, a consortium of Intel, Google, PC makers and other technology companies announced their intent to increase the PC’s overall energy efficiency to 90 percent.
Products that idle in what the industry calls low-power mode consumed about 10 percent of total electricity in California homes, according to a 2002 study prepared for the California Energy Commission by the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. A few of those devices, even those with Energy Star ratings that signal that they are less wasteful, still use a lot of power. “Some of the larger big-screen TVs consume as much energy each year as a new refrigerator,” according to Noah Horowitz, a scientist at the Natural Resources Defense Council.
You do not have to use an energy meter to reduce your consumption. If you don’t turn off your PC when it is not in use, make sure it goes into a low-power sleep, suspend or hibernate mode. That doesn’t always happen automatically. Windows XP has both a suspend and hibernate option, but it isn’t always turned on by default. Computers running the Windows XP operating system can be configured by clicking on Power Options in the Control Panel to set the number of minutes before Windows will turn off the monitor and hard disks or put the system into standby or hibernate mode. (Hibernation uses the least amount of energy). If it is a notebook PC, there are separate settings for when it runs on the battery then when it is plugged in.
Microsoft says that it has overhauled energy management in its Vista operating system so that machines, by default, should go into a low-power state after 60 minutes of inactivity. The PC sips only a few watts until the user touches the mouse or keyboard. To configure a machine with Vista, type “Power Options” in the search box at the bottom of the Start menu and click on “Change when the computer sleeps.”
You can install Co2 Saver (co2saver.snap.com), a free program for Windows XP and Vista that seems to have solved the problem. It gives you a simple control panel to specify when to turn off monitors and disk drives and put the machine to sleep. It also adjusts some hard-to-configure settings. One option forces the machine to “Initiate sleep mode if system doesn’t sleep automatically.” This feature, according to its developer, Lee Hasiuk, defeats Windows attempts to keep a machine awake if it thinks (correctly or otherwise) that it is detecting a background task other than mouse or keyboard activity.
Whatever machine you are using, consider having it go into sleep, standby or hibernate after about a half-hour of inactivity. The shorter the period, the more energy you save. Graphic-intense screen savers can actually waste power.
Unplug unused external power supplies because they can draw energy even when they are not connected to a device.
If you are shopping for a new PC, be sure that it meets Energy Star requirements. The new standards require that 80 percent of the power consumed is actually used by the PC.
Use an L.C.D. screen instead of an old-fashioned cathode ray tube monitor. L.C.D.’s are as much as 66 percent more efficient than C.R.T.’s, according to the Energy Department.
Consider buying a notebook PC, rather than a less-efficient desktop. Because notebooks are designed to run on batteries, they are equipped with chips and drives that draw less power. Seagate’s 160GB 2.5-inch drive uses one-fourth the energy of the equivalent 3.5-inch drive, according to a Seagate product manager, Joni Clark. In addition, the screen is integrated on notebooks, there is only one power supply.
Consider a machine with a low-voltage processor like the Intel Core 2 Duo or one with A.M.D.’s “Cool and Quiet” technology. Trim desktop models also tend to use less energy. The new Hewlett-Packard Slimline models use about 45 watts, which is considerably lower than many larger PCs.

Comparing Apples to Apples, the $1,199 2-gigahertz iMac with a 17-inch monitor uses only 45 watts, and the 20-inch model uses 80 watts. (Apple’s high-end Mac Pro desktop workstation consumed a whopping 220 watts, without a monitor.) The iMac, according to Steven P. Jobs, Apple’s chief executive, is optimized for energy savings because all the computer components are housed in the same chassis as the monitor, allowing for more efficient power distribution and cooling.
Tweaking can pay off. Annually, my desktop is now using 73 percent less energy — saving me $119 a year and depriving the earth of 1,405 more pounds of CO2.