GigaMegaBlog

Despite its source, the quote just seemed wrong: “Your microwave uses more electricity to power the digital clock for the 23 hours and 55 minutes a day that you’re not using it than the five minutes you do to heat your dinner.”

The source is a column by Jim Harris in the National Post newspaper.  I have a great deal of respect both for Jim Harris, former leader of Canada’s national Green Party, and the National Post.  I’ve never known either to play fast and loose with the numbers to prove a point — indeed the Post regularly exposes scientists who do so in their Junk Science articles.

But a clock based on ultraefficient LED or LCDs burning more power in a day than a food-zapping microwave does in 5 minutes?  That doesn’t sound right.

And it isn’t, for my oven.  Here are the stats for my 12 year old 1000W oven, a Sanyo EM-P540 with an LCD clock.  I measured these stats with the Kill-A-Watt gadget that I’ve mentioned in previous blog entries.

My microwave's power consumption

	Watts	mAmps	kWH
5 minutes cooking	1500	14000	0.12
24 hours standby	1	20	0.05

The power used by my microwave oven when not used is 42% of the power when cooking a meal for 5 minutes. Put another way, my microwave would use 30% less power if I unplugged it when not in use.

I was rather surprised at the wattage reading – it’s a 1000W oven, after all.  However, the user’s guide does confirm that it consumes 1480W to output 1000W.  Apparently this is fairly typical of a microwave oven: this Wikipedia article says that average power efficiency is 64%.

It could be that Jim Harris is referring to a particularly low power oven, or a ridiculously exorbitant clock.  There is no way of knowing, since he doesn’t provide a source for this or any of the other stats that are in his article.

The unfortunate thing is that he didn’t need to massage the numbers, since he has a point.   I would have thought that unplugging my microwave would reduce its daily power consumption by maybe 5%.   Thanks to his article, though, I now know better.

However, by exaggerating the numbers to support his argument, or quoting somebody else’s numbers without identifying them, I think he is less likely to make his case.  He is, after all, not preaching to the converted who already know about these issues — he’s trying to convince skeptics who think that a large part of the environmental movement is hogwash.  The sentence that I quoted at the beginning of this post is certainly not going to help to change their minds.

The main point of Jim Harris’ article, by the way, is that device manufacturers can and should engineer their products to burn less energy when not in use.  He’s absolutely right, and I hope manufacturers, retailers and consumers take note.  When Harris  led the Green Party he used common sense and business acumen to pitch green initiatives to the corporate world, a constructive approach that the Greens now sorely lack.  In his series of columns in the National Post columns he has shown a knack for pointing out needless wasting of our environmental resources that most of us overlook: escalators left running overnight, roofs that are the wrong colour, or microwaves with clocks that hardly anybody needs.

As an environmentalist myself, I just wish that he, and especially the better known and less responsible leaders of the green movement, would stop wasting another valuable resource, their credibility, by publishing unsourced, dubious statistics.

I’m sure you’ve all heard about the Silent Planet Killers that we are allegedly harboring in our living rooms: TVs, VCRs and other consumer electronics which burn electricity even when turned off.

I have a co-worker who jumped on that bandwagon early on and dutifully switches off the living room power bar each evening.  She’s a pinko, so I didn’t take her self-righteous claims about the resulting the power savings seriously.

Over the past few years, though, I’ve seen this claim repeated in a lot of magazine and newspaper articles, some of which were written by people not previously suspected of being pinkos.  When I saw the “turn off your power bar” advice recently repeatedly on Morningstar, a stock market research site and generally sensible handmaiden to capitalism, I decided it was time to finally take a serious look at the issue.

I recently bought a few P3 Kill A Watt devices in preparation for building some Tweet A Watts (no relation) for the main receptacles in my apartment.  As a way of testing  both the Kill A Watt units and the Silent Planet Killer claim, I plugged one into my living room wall and began unplugging things.

I started out with the TV turned on, whispering about some golfers, and the DVD and VCR players turned on but just sitting around and looking pretty.  For the purpose of this experiment, I brought an old incandescent 60W bulb out of storage and turned it on, along with a 2nd lamp burning a basically equivalent 13W compact florescent bulb.

The Kill A Watt Experiment

Device turned off	Total Milliamps	Total Watts	Notes
All devices on	2070	198
Lamp with 60W incandescent bulb	1640	139	Aha, only 59 W. Did Al Gore lie to us?
Lamp with 13W fluorescent bulb	1530	125	Aha, 14W! He was totally lying!
TV	580	53	A 20 year old RCA 24-inch TV. OK, Gore has me here. But, remember, the TV was turned on and playing. This is the savings from turning it off, not unplugging it.
Amplifier	200	16	A 10 year old behemoth, also RCA. This sucker is left on a lot of the time ((fully powered on, not just standby - my wife's fault), so here's an easy 37W of savings
VCR	150	12	The Morningstar article specifically said VCRs were "notoriously bad" at draining power when not being used. 4W ain't notorious in my house.
DVD	150	11	The Kill A Watt rounds to the nearest 10 milliamp
Amplifier (unplugged)	140	10	Probably worth doing, since it has no programming to remember, or even a clock
TV (unplugged)	110	6	Hmmm, higher than expected. Burns same wattage as a nightlight.
Internet router	90	3	Yeah, I left my precious Internet connection to the end of the experiment. Thank God its not a Planet Killer. Or is it...??
Secondary power bar	60	1	Wow, 2 watts for that stupid lighted on-button? The power bar is definitely gone.

 

And the final 6 mA and 1 watt?  It turned out to be the DC adapter for my Linksys router — the Kill A Watt readings didn’t drop to 0 until I unplugged the adapter as well.  What’s up with that, Cisco?  Building global warming, one watt at a time?

So what can we conclude from all this?

1. The Silent Planet Killers in my living room, combined, burn 9 watts (not counting the soon-to-be-banished lighted power bar).  Almost 3/4 of what the fluorescent light bulb burns.
2. Would you leave 3/4 of a lightbulb on all the time?  Me neither.
3. My wife says, tough, she’s not going to reprogram the TV every morning.
4. My wife says that I have too much time on my hands.
5. My router’s DC power adapter is the real global menace.
6. As well as my wife.

In the spring a GigaMegaGeek’s fancy stubbornly stays focused on gadgets and coding, but some of my neighbours have other ideas.

For the second year in a row, the company where I work has played host to a Canada Goose nest right next to our parking lot.  The eggs hatched yesterday, and Mother and Father Goose have been showing the neighbourhood to their 6 kids.  I suppose everybody thinks their geese are special, but mine really are!  As proof, here are some fascinating facts about my geese:

1) The location of the nest itself is somewhat of a surprise — 2 feet from a very busy parking lot, as you can see from the photo — but I’m quite surprised that the exact same location has been used for the next both times.  I have no idea whether this year’s parents are the same as last year’s, but there was definitely no sign of any geese in this area while the ground was covered in snow, from about December to March.  That spot seems to be a dubious location for a nest, yet clearly my geese know otherwise.  And you can’t argue with their success rate –two for two.

2) While geese are said to be  monogamous, they sure aren’t liberated — Mom did all of the nest sitting as far as I could tell, and was faithfully sitting on that nest on all but one time that I passed by over the last month.  On the one instance when she had wandered a few feet away to graze the lawn, about 10 days ago, I peeked in the nest and was dismayed to see nothing but a layer of goose feathers.  I was afraid that we had a seriously deluded goose on our hands, but it turns out that she just did a clever job of covering the eggs before stretching her legs.

3) Our company is not only hosting a nest, but last year we hosted a Goose Day Care.  A couple of days after the eggs hatched last year, we were astounded to see a herd of 24 goslings being guided through the parking lot by 4 adults.  I have no idea how many goose families were involved — our pair only had 6 young last year, same as this year — but that herd stayed together in the area under about October.     This year’s pair has 4 other interested adults hanging around the nest (older brothers and sisters of this year’s goslings, I suspect), and we may have a new herd forming.  I just took a walk around the area and came across another group of 5 goslings about 100 yards from here.

4) The goslings get shoved out of the nest very quickly — they are up and walking within a few hours of being born — but the family returns to the nest at night.  I just took the above photo, and you’ll have to take my word for it that tucked underneath Mom are 6 squirming goslings.  (You can see a fragment of one of the eggs to the left of the nest).

Meanwhile, in the west end of Toronto, the 2 peregrine falcons that inhabit the highrise condo where I live are at it again.  They laid 3 eggs last year, and seemed to have done the same again this year until a 4th egg suddenly became visible yesterday.  As in 2008, fellow resident Matt Rossi is taking some amazing photos of the pair, and has just setup a web cam pointed at the nest.  Since the first of the eggs is expected to hatch anytime now, I’d urge you to keep an eye on  Matt’s web site to see how things go.

Peregrine falcons are gradually rebounding from the brink of extinction in Canada, but the odds are  against the young making it past the “fledgling” stage (that is, learning to fly).  Too many things can go wrong, both in the wild and in the city.  Sadly, we found that out firsthand last year.  All three of last year’s chicks successfully learned to fly and went off to explore the world, but all three died later in the year in collisions, 2 of them at Pearson airport.

There’s no way of knowing how things will turn out this year, but thanks to Matt and his incredible camera work we’ll all have the opportunity to find out over the coming months.

This is a rare post that isn’t directly about programming or technology, but I wanted to pay tribute to a truly fascinating web site put together by a fellow resident of our highrise in west Toronto.

Back in late March we were surprised to find that our building had become home to a couple of ornithological celebrities: two peregrine falcons.  These birds are an endangered species in Canada (and many other parts of the world), nearly wiped out in the 1970s by DDT poisoning.  Since they love high perches and pigeons, peregrines are not uncommon residents in large cities, and the Canadian Peregrine Foundation’s web site lists a number of nests in the Greater Toronto Area.  For whatever reason, though, it is rare for these birds to choose a residential building as their nest site.  Ours is the only such building in Toronto, and one of only 2 in the province.  It’s our building’s biggest claim to fame since Blue Jays’ shortstop Luis Sojo lived here in the 90s.

Over the past few months we’ve enjoyed following the comings and goings (at up to 200 km/h) of our new neighbours, through bad times (they abandoned their first nest after all of the eggs failed to hatch) and good (they went 3 for 3 with the eggs in their second nest).  You can follow them too, thanks to the Peregrine Falcon Zone 2008 web site set up by building resident Matthew Rossi.

Matthew has combined his talent for photography and web site design to put together a fantastic photojournal of the falcons’ lives at the condo.  If you want to see what a peregrine falcon looks like up close, or in flight, or at just 1 day old, or tearing the head of a blue jay (not Luis!), here’s your chance.  Trust me, you’ll get an even better look at the falcons through these photos then you will by being on-site. 

When the falcon’s second batch of eggs approached their due date, Matthew began adding daily nest observations to go with the photos, including the drama of the 1^st hatching (after a night of near-biblical rainfall), the 2^nd later the same day and, after a tense 24 hours of watching the last egg lie unincubated, the third.

This weekend live video was added to the site.  Since the nest is on the north tip of the building and the protective parents made it unadvisable to setup a camera on the roof or a nearby ledge, the video is being shot from a camera outfitted with a high zoom lens positioned inside another building.  Throw in the additional challenge of compensating for the glare off the concrete building and the shadows cast by the side of the ledge, and the resulting video quality is amazing, much better than I can get with my 8×40 binoculars. 

Matthew recently gave the site a graphic redesign to make it, in my humble opinion, the best peregrine falcon site on the Web.  Check it out!  Then come back in a few days and check again — those little suckers are growing up fast.  

My wife’s PC occasionally (about once every 3 months) stops playing nice with the other PCs in my house, rejecting file sharing and print requests with an error message ” No more connections can be made to this remote computer at this time because there are already as many connections as the computer can accept.”

The first time I saw this error I was perplexed and somewhat alarmed. XP Home is supposed to have a hard-coded limit of 5 connections, and we don’t have that many PCs in our household. With visions of a horde of hackers (well, a horde of 5 hackers) running amok on the PC, I ran over to pull its network cable, and spent the next hour poring through the Event Viewer and Firewall logs for some indication of how these intruders had broke in. The Event Viewer just had its usual list of generally mundane and often incomprehensible messages. (“The local computer may not have the necessary registry information or message DLL files to display messages from a remote computer.” Good to know!) No viruses reared their ugly heads, and no files proved to be missing or changed. Looks like an inside job, sarge.
Although I usually scoff at those who blame Microsoft bugs for every problem they encounter on their PCs, I’ve come to regard this message as nothing more than a gradual build-up of crud in the Windows connection sharing code. My wife’s PC is used for both printer and MP3 sharing, so connections are frequent and, in a wireless household, sometimes dropped.

Fortunately, there is a quick fix to the problem (assuming you have a way of getting at the PC): just restart the networking stack. The quickest way to do that is to right-click on the system tray icon for your connection and select Repair. If you don’t have a system tray icon, select Control Panel, then Network Connections, and right-click on the item for your network. The “repair” process takes a few seconds, no reboot necessary, and all queued print requests should immediately start printing.
If you Google the error message, you’ll find a lot of theories on the root cause of this error, but none of them seemed to apply to my situation. Perhaps XP SP3 will fix this one, but if not I’ll just keep taking the easy way out.