Re: Bollocks: Call to scrap TV standby buttons to help environment

In article <tgjp4292jqbbea456c0lm27vp3cgnclfs9@xxxxxxx>, Hugo Nebula
<abuse@localhost.?> writes
On Mon, 24 Apr 2006 13:44:57 +0100, a particular chimpanzee named
Norman Wells <norman@xxxxxxxxxxx> randomly hit the keyboard and
produced:

You're obviously incapable of following the argument, which has been put
very simply and repeated a number of times. Most of any heat emitted by
electrical devices overnight is heat that doesn't have to be made up for
in the morning by the heating system. If you turn devices off, you save
the energy they would otherwise consume. In the morning, the heating
system has to compensate, thereby using up, I calculate, about 80% of
the energy you think you've saved but haven't.

You calculate? You're wrong. Wrong, wrong, wrong, wrong. Wrong.

If we calculate it in terms of carbon dioxide emitted, which is what
all this boils down to. The 'heat' coming from electricity uses
0.422kgCO2/kWh of delivered energy, compared to 0.194kgCO2/kWh for
mains gas. If a standard modern boiler is 78% efficient, this equates
to 0.249kgCO2/kWh of useful heat, only 60% of electricity. As I've
said before, most normal people don't have their heating on 12 months
of the year. If we assume heating for 8 months of the year, this
means that only 40% of the CO2 produced from domestic appliances can
count towards offsetting that used for heating. This is without
calculating the extra heat losses which occur if the internal
temperature is higher than the outside; you've assumed that none of
the heat from the appliances has been lost to the fabric.

You, sir, are talking out of your arse.

We can bandy around figures all day, but it won't make much difference.
Have you, for example taken into account that over 20% of our
electricity is currently generated by nuclear power which has virtually
zero CO2 emissions? Or that not everyone uses gas for their heating
(though they should), or that their boiler may not be a 'standard
modern' one with 78% efficiency, or that, even if the boiler is 78%
efficient, it doesn't mean that all of that energy is translated into
useful heat where you want it? There will be losses through pipework
wherever the hot water runs, maybe through the loft space, and so on,
depending on the degree of insulation.

The fact remains though, even if we accept for the sake of argument that
you can only offset 40% of the CO2 emissions caused by electrical
devices, the energy and CO2 savings are not as great as you might think
at first glance. They are 20% if you use electric heating, at the very
most 60% if you use gas heating, and what if you use oil? The amounts
saved in economic terms are still tiny. I calculated £3.60 a year by
turning off 8 devices every night overnight. Even if I accept
everything you say and double the amount wasted in my calculation, it
still only comes to £7.20 a year. Hardly a fortune. And, since we pay
per kilowatt-hour, which is proportional to the amount of CO2 emitted,
it's not a lot of CO2 either.

How much CO2 do you breathe out in a year, I wonder?

If you consume 2700 Calories a day, that's 11302 kiloJoules in 24 hours
or 86400 seconds. Since 1 watt is 1 Joule per second, you are running
at an average of (11302 x 1000)/ 86400 or 130 watts (making 3.12kWh in a
day), and giving off carbon dioxide in proportion.

That's instructive. You use 20 times what a TV does on standby.

Perhaps it's you we should be turning off.

--
Norman Wells
.

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