Garage Door Opener (receiver runs all the time)

Timers that turn appliances on or off

X10 equipment/outlets/sockets/controllers

Any pilot light (surge supressor strips)

Plumbing Pipe Heating Tapes (probably not on, but you never know)

When it gets down to the final determination of where the power is going, sometimes you have to turn off all your breakers and then turn them on one at a time (while checking your meter for usage) until you determine which circuit is sucking the power, and then trace it. That may require something as simple as a portable lamp, or as complicated as "fox and hound" cable tracers.

You _will_ ultimately figure out what is going on.

I've actually already done the turn off the breakers and watch the spinning meter thing. turning off my entire house barely made it slow down. turning off the water system in the shop, namely that circulation pump, makes the meter effectively stop.

http://www.grainger.com/Grainger/produc ... 55&ccitem=

This should drop that part by about 1/40th I hope to get my hands on one within the next month. After that I'll start tracking down the other big drains

Frequently I see people in forums relating to energy conservation talk about electric appliances and light bulbs and such as if they "use up" energy, as if this energy just disappears into nothingness.

In fact, with whatever the appliance you're talking about, televisions, computers, light bulbs, etc, almost 100% of the electric energy used by the appliance is turned into heat.

I have electric baseboard heat, and this heat is on during probably 80% of the year. Even during much of the summer, it will come on at night. (I live in Seattle, which has mild summers)

The electricity used by my computer or television is converted into heat, which helps heat my home. Any heat produced by appliances doesn't need to come out of the baseboard heaters. As a result, the vast majority of the time, my appliances are not costing me anything to operate in terms of energy. It makes practically no difference whether the heat is coming out of my computer or out of the baseboard heater which is 2 feet away from the computer.

Of course, if you're using heating oil, it may be cheaper to heat your home using the oil than using electricity. And if it's warm enough already that you don't need the heat, then this energy is indeed all wasted. And if it's so hot that you're air conditioning your home, then the energy is doubly wasted, as you'll have to use up more electricity in the air conditioning system to make up for the heat produced by your appliances.

One way or another, though, something one should be aware of if one is thinking in terms of energy conservation.

Actually, (in the winter), appliances and lights are often more efficient than baseboard. Waste occurs if heat is not evenly distributed within the living space. Baseboards kick in at full throttle, heated air rises to the ceiling. Other devices are distributive in comparison.

Your post is well taken as, if you thing about it, humans are energy ignorant. I remember a class called music appreciation, perhaps educators should consider energy appreciation.

Getting back to the baseboards, if it's already invented I've not heard of it: baseboards should heat up incrementally, predicated on the actual vs target differential. Say the outside temp is 60, the BB's might stay warm to the touch all day. This would be more efficient, confortable and eliminate annoying clicks of expanding heating elements [that go with the cycling of bb's].

I agree that there is some marginal heating function provided by computers etc. However . . .

The heat produced by appliances makes makes your refrigerator and freezer and air-conditioning system less efficient.

Most of the U.S. doesn't enjoy your situation with cool summers. In a fast-warming world, cooling will be more important than heating in the future.

Bear in mind that lots of energy is wasted during the mining or pumping of the fuel that eventually creates the electricity used to run your appliances. A lot of electricity is wasted during transmission over wires, too. Every gizmo you plug in is only adding to the total problem and accelerating the day of reckoning.

You always have to look at the source to determine how efficient an electric powered device is. Electricity is actually very similar to a tank of compressed air or hydraulic fluid. You generally need to use kinetic energy to produce the pressure. Coal is often the source of that kinetic energy. Coal power plants are rather inefficient, often below 35%. In fact, in some cases, only about 10% of that original energy expenditure is actually put to work in your house. This is because electricity has a lot of losses when transmitted long distances. The other problem with round the clock electric generation is that during evening hours, a lot of energy is expended simply turning generators with little load.

The holy grail of energy inventions is a small efficient electric generator to power your house or car. Somebody invent something!

Computers are virtually 100% efficient at producing electric heat, just as baseboard heaters are. I could remove all my baseboard heaters and replace them with computers, the cost of the electricity would be the same.
I'm not sure why you say that appliance heat would make refrigerators less efficient. This would only be true if the appliances are heating the home to a hotter temperature than one would like. Otherwise, they would have no effect on the refrigerator at all, unless they were radiating heat directly onto it.

I agree, though, that we in seattle are lucky, regarding energy. We have cheap electricity, 85% of which comes from hydroelectric, mild winters (it snows maybe a couple days a winter), summers mild enough that almost no one has air conditioners.
If you live in a hot location where you're running air conditioning for months a year, you need to pay attention to how much heat your appliances are churning out. During the cooler months where you're heating the home anyway, however, turn on all your appliances at once if you like, they'll heat the house nicely.

Congratulations, you just discovered the principle of conservation of energy. The thing is energy, and the amount of work you can extract from it are two different things. Eventually all energy, goes to random thermal motion, which is heat, which is another way of saying entropy of a closed system always increases. But, just because you have energy doesn't mean you can extract work from it.
-A

I see your point, stark. But the real test of your idea is to see whether adding and running electrical appliances affects your total electricity bill in the winter. My guess is that your bill goes up (but what we really need here is the opinion of an expert). Computers and TVs and so forth use electricity for other purposes; heat release is just a byproduct. Appliances intended for heating alone have got to be more efficient as heaters.
I heat my house entirely with wood from my own land, so my perspective is very different from yours. My heating cost is essentially nil (I write off harvesting firewood as recreation).

I don't dispute your point that appliances can provide some home heating in the winter, and that this offsets (to a small degree) the cost of running them. However, I've never heard of anyone heating his house with computers, and that would be a very expensive prospect because of the cost of the computers!
I envy you your Seattle summers; right now in central VA it's in the 90s and the heat index is 105. Home heating is the last thing on my mind!

Actually I heat my house with computers for what it's worth. I've got no central heating, I do have a couple of gas fires but I don't use them, and electric water heater (which I use only when I need hot water).

Actually, they aren't. One of the basic laws of the universe says that energy cannot be destroyed, it merely changes form. So the electric energy that your computer runs off of is not being destroyed. Where is it going? It is being turned into heat, virtually all of it, just as an electric baseboard heater turns all its electricity into heat. Since computers are about 100% efficient at turning their energy into heat already, electric heaters cannot be any more efficient than this.

The only inefficiency in terms of appliances being used to heat homes is that a tiny amount of the energy leaks out of your home, in the form of radio waves, sound, light escaping through windows. This would be less than 1% of the energy, other than perhaps spotlights in your home facing directly out windows.

I use my computer + monitor as a space heater in the Winter. I can turn
off the heat to my room often.

However, in the Summer it's another matter.

Living in Wisconsin I've got no AC... so on these 90+ (F) degree days my room
gets rather.... warm. Especially when computer + huge ass CRT are on. I hate
hot weather.

(Sitting in room wearing nothing but underwear, still sweating, with a fan blowing
hot air on me).

Hmm maybe this winter I'll just take my oscilloscpe to bed with me (it blows warm air out the sides when it's on). javascript:emoticon(':P')

It's true that energy cannot be destroyed. But I still think you're making a fundamental error. Appliances that aren't designed as space heaters usually have shielding and insulation that, watt-for-watt, make them less efficient as space heaters than appliances that ARE designed as heaters. The heat energy that a TV generates isn't being destroyed, of course, but it isn't all being efficiently transferred to your living space. Therefore, some (not all) of the heat generated is "wasted" from your space-heating perspective.

I find that my home gets very cold very fast in the winter when all I have running is the usual appliances and not my wood stove. Whatever heat my electrical appliances contribute does not seem to be meaningful from a practical standpoint.

Also not true. If there is no mechanical energy/work being performed, then all of the incoming energy to your appliance comes off as heat or radiant energy. The light that gets through you windows is lost. All the heat though, no matter how slowly in enters the environment, does eventually enter the envirornment. The efficiency of space heater design is just a function of rate and volume.