On 10/26/2014 8:07 AM, Brewster wrote:
On 10/25/14, 1:15 PM, Dan Coby wrote:
On 10/25/2014 7:47 AM, Brewster wrote:

snip
When I was playing around with one of those cheap power monitor meters I
decided to check out my drill chargers (Milwaukee NiMH & Lion). Turns
out they suck about 4 watts each without batteries being charged. I took
an old-school timer switch and set it so it activates for 1 hour per
day. This keeps the batteries charged and saves me the 184 Watts (8W *
23 hours) a day. The timer didn't register on the power meter so I
assume it's maybe a Watt to power.
Total savings? Close to $0.10/year!

-BR

The pay back time is not that bad. If you are saving 184 watt hours

Not Watt hours, these are Watt/days.

A kilowatt hour is 1000 watts of power being used for 1 hour. The
electric company bills for kilowatt hours used.

Your power usage for the chargers was 8 watts. Every hour you were using
8 watt hours (or 0.008 kilowatt hours). Each day you save 184 watt
hours (or 0.184 kilowatt hours). So you save 0.184 kilowatt hours
per day. Each year you save 365 times 0.184 kilowatt hours = 67.16
kilowatt hours per year.


Point being, having things on a timer can save some cash. My electric
water heater is on a timer, basically it is set to run for an hour in
the early morning, cost savings shows maybe 15% over the pre-timer days
(water heating is metered separately so it's easy to verify).
As pointed out however, sometimes the cost of equipment can far exceed
the savings 8^)


per day, then you are saving 67.16 kilowatt hours per year. If you
pay $0.12 per kilowatt hour then your savings is $8.06 per year. If
you pay $0.35 per kilowatt hour then your savings is $23.51 per year. (I
chose those rates since those are the numbers on the sliding scale
on my electric bill.)

Dan