As the price of domestic electricity soars higher and higher in the wake of rising global energy prices, more and more people are looking for ways in which to save money on their electric bill. However, there are many popular misconceptions about the best ways to conserve electricity which can actually lead to increased energy wastage if they are carried out. Here, we shall discuss a few of the more common myths surrounding electricity use, and what the best ways to be energy efficient really are.
Myth Number One: It is cheaper to leave a light on all the time rather than turn it off and on frequently. Although this may be true of the high-pressure sodium bulbs used in street lighting, you are very unlikely to have any of these in your home. All the common types of domestic light bulb, such as incandescent, fluorescent, halogen, and LED, work in a different way, and use far less energy if you turn them off whenever they are not needed, even if just for a second.
Myth Number Two: Switching a computer on and off takes more energy than it does to leave it on. A typical desktop PC is rated at around 3-400W, the equivalent energy drain of between four and five incandescent bulbs. It uses no more energy to get started or prepare for a shutdown than it does for normal operation. The only advantage in leaving it on is if you are leaving the computer alone for less time than it takes to power on or off, ie a couple of minutes at the most. The best solution is to set your computer to go into power saver mode when it is left idle for more than a minute or two, which brings the power usage down to a minimum but allows you to resume your session quickly as well.
Myth Number Three: Keeping a room cool all day with air conditioning is more energy efficient than cooling a hot room at the end of a day. Air conditioning systems are perhaps the most energy-intensive appliance you can have in a home, so there is no cheap way of keeping your room cool all day. At any rate, most air-conditioning systems will manage to cool a hot room in just a few minutes, and although this will use more electricity per second than leaving it running at a higher temperature, when these costs are multiplied by the time taken for each action, the quick cooling method comes out on top by a long way in the energy efficiency stakes.
Myth Number Four: Frayed or broken wires can cause you to lose valuable electricity to the air, reducing the efficiency of your electrical system. Electricity cannot be lost to the air in this way, as it requires a constant flow of electrons through a conductor, and if a connection between two points is broken, then no electricity can flow.
Myth Number Five: 120 volt appliances use half the energy of 240 volt appliances. As electricity is measured by the electricity providers in terms of power, measured in KiloWatt Hours, rather than Voltage, and the power of a device is determined by the voltage multiplied by the current, we can see that a 240 volt device would simply need half the current required by a 120 volt device.
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