Energy Inefficiencies in the Home

This post highlights the energy inefficiencies inherent in popular consumer household electrical items.

Power Outages

We regularly experience power outages here in Australia. These days I use our off grid energy system in our RV to power 240V AC loads during outages but typical home appliances are generally very energy inefficient.

Off Grid Energy for Home Usage

This system has 600 W of solar (300 W connected and charging), 200Ahr of Lithium Iron Phosphate batteries and a Victron MPPT Solar Charge controller with inbuilt Bluetooth. A Renogy 3000 W pure sine wave inverter and Renogy ethernet Canbus hub provide Bluetooth connectivity to the Renogy app. This system is used to heat hot water for our shower, power electric cooking loads and to run all 240V AC outlets, USB outlets and 12V loads in our RV. The Renogy LiPo4 batteries are limited in their maximum output so we limit max loads to 2000W at any time.

We run a fairly typical home entertainment system but we don’t utilise the ‘smart’ components or wifi of the TV, preferring an ethernet connection to our router. We route to the internet through a consumer grade router / modem to a Starlink modem which connects to the Starlink ground terminal using a proprietary cable.

Energy Usage by the Numbers

Here I’ve converted the energy consumption to kWhr / day. This allows us to directly determine our energy budget and compare it to our daily solar generation.

In the table above we can see the energy inefficiency of the typical household flat screen TV. I’m sure many folks would be surprised at how much energy is consumed in the home by everyday appliances. I’m sure many people would be displeased to know that watching feel good shows on the need to deal with climate change (human impact is my preferred term) on their TV is just adding to our unnecessary energy usage. It’s only when you need to power these energy guzzling devices from 12V or 48V batteries that the waste becomes visible.

On a more positive note the Amazon Fire TV Stick is very energy efficient. I’ve travelled with one of these devices since they first became available. I didn’t realise how energy efficient they were. Not only are they great for bypassing annoying hotel TV options, they also make a great backup internet access device. Mine are equipped with a VPN and by using the Amazon Silk browser and virtual keyboard they leave no trace when using public computers.

The Starlink ground terminal has an RF output of around 4 W to comply with the typical consumer transmission device like a cell phone. It’s energy usage is quite high as it is constantly steering 1024 beam forming chips to follow each satellite which traverses it LEO of 550 km at around 7000 kph. The energy measurement in this post was of the Starlink modem which supplies power to the modem and the ground terminal. I’ll have to look in the raw data to see if I can extract ground terminal power seperate to the modem. I also have a spare (damaged) Starlink modem to ground terminal cable; I might be able to splice into the power feed and monitor data usage that way.

When I get a chance I’ll update this post with energy consumption of a smaller Smart TV and various computer screens to see how they compare in energy usage to the 65 inch Smart TV.

Continue reading articles in my Sustainability series

• Passive House Concept
• Passive House Off Grid Sustainability
• Passive House Solar Irradiation Model