Massive Power Outage

[Erax]

To get back to energy conservation...

Brazil went through a power shortage in 2001-2002. I won't get into the causes here but the fact is that the government should have seen it coming and didn't. To their credit, once they got going they handled things quite well. One of the measures was a residential energy quota of 200 kWh per house per month, with a BIG surcharge on any power spent over that amount.

At the time, we were spending way over that, which makes no sense since it's only two people in the house. My wife went completely paranoid with the light bulbs and such, but those don't use up that much power (neither does a computer, BTW). So we took a hard look at all our appliances and discovered the following :

- We had two refrigerators but we really only used one. Pulling the plug on one of them saved us around 40 kWh/month.

- My wife drinks coffee around the clock. She had an electric percolator which she kept on all day to keep the coffe warm. Doing it the old way - heating water on the gas stove and putting the coffee in a thermos bottle - saved us 130 kWh/month.

So it turns out we were just throwing a lot of power away, every month, day in and day out, without even noticing it. And the worst thing is, we weren't using it to make our lives better in any significant way.

So am I in favor of conservation ? Sure, if you do it rationally, the sacrifice involved is minimal.

[Baron Munchausen]

The actual power use of appliances can be surprisingly different than you expect, but that's a real shocker. Most households that don't use electric heat (a terrible waste of electricity, btw) spend the most on refrigerators as I recall. Lights may not use much individually but add up all the lights around a house and it gets to be quite a bit. Compact flourescents are a Good Thing. But you never know when some little appliance might have a very big appettite...

130 kw a month for COFFEE!? Wow...

[Baron Grazic]

The Australian media have reported 3 different causes to the black-out.
1 - Lightening - which I think they have now ruled out.
2 - An old overgrown tree snagged a main powerlines that was sagging, which caused a cascading effect tripping the safety switches.
3 - My favourite. A yet unknown terrorist group brain washed a squad of squirrels into making a suicide runs onto the major power lines.

[minipol]

Originally posted by Erax:
- My wife drinks coffee around the clock. She had an electric percolator which she kept on all day to keep the coffe warm. Doing it the old way - heating water on the gas stove and putting the coffee in a thermos bottle - saved us 130 kWh/month.

Woooww. I'm impressed. If your wife drinks coffee around the clock, isn't she hyped all the time?

[Krsqk]

Originally posted by Thermodyne:
The people in Ohio are now saying that there was a severe current flux prior to the circuit trip they suffered. According to them, it occurred repeatedly for several hours prior to the event. And they are again pointing the finger to the north. They way these guys cover their tails, they must have been politicians in their Last jobs.

Politics happens in more jobs than just government--and it seems more vicious the smaller the stakes, actually.

[tesco samoa]

200 kwh per month.

I think i could do it. Barely though. I average 15 kwh per day right now.

[rextorres]

Maybe the U.S. should consider invading itself.

The billions spent fixing Iraq's power and water infrastructure would fix the U.S.' problems.

[ August 20, 2003, 02:57: Message edited by: rextorres ]