APPLIANCES

One refrigerator cycle plus an hourly hiccup from the DVD player.

This series corresponds to a time when the photovoltaic system’s battery was low (cloudy/rainy period), so all household power is reported by TED. It’s much noisier than usual. After the refrigerator cycle (characteristically higher power at first), the DVD player woke up wondering what time it was, and checked for cable service we no longer have to get the answer. It does this every hour, spending 13 minutes at 8 W, costing about 40 Wh per day. Normally, this system is on solar, and I have plenty of juice to cover it, so don’t really care. But maybe I should address it all the same.

But this data set is rather boring, yes? Let’s move on.

Front-load washing machine cycle.

The clothes washer makes quite the rich TED subject. Firstly, our washer consumes 6 W to sit doing absolutely nothing if left plugged in. Criminal! 6 W may sound like a pittance, but when our utility electricity baseline is around 40 W (as seen in many of these TED plots), 6 W becomes substantial. Over the course of a year, it adds up to $6, or about one sizable burrito. So the first event we see in the plot is a little step corresponding to plugging in the machine. Then it’s a tumble, stop; tumble, stop sequence over and over as the machine practices the art of washing clothes. Later on, the soapy water is spun out, rinsed, and spun again, in cyclic fashion. At the end, things get serious as the drum spins up to 1000 rotations per minute or thereabouts to wring the clothes dry.

In total, the process consumed 132 Wh of energy.

Clothes washer, rice cooker, and microwave; all mixed together.

Okay, want a bit of chaos? Here we have a clothes washing cycle starting two minutes in. The rice cooker is turned on at ten minutes, was on for 16 minutes, off for three (for some reason), then on for another 6. Also thrown in are short microwave cooking invocations at minutes 26, 35, 39, and 41.

Out of the total 420 Wh represented in this cacophony (above baseline), 183 Wh is attributable to the rice cooker, operating at 500 W. We’ll assume 132 Wh for the clothes washer—as was the case before. It looks like the microwave ran a total of about four minutes at 1740 W for 116 Wh. Adding these up, I get 430 Wh, which is close enough to 420 to satisfy me. Maybe the microwave ran twenty seconds less than my crude estimate, or the washing machine does not do exactly the same thing every time (could investigate…).

Dishwasher, plus a bit of microwave (twice).

Finally, we have the dishwasher. Unfortunately, my tardy initiation of data export resulted in my missing the first three minutes of the dishwashing activity. But I know when it started based on the one-minute-sampled data (and set the left-hand extent of the axis to correspond to this time, for visual effect). The microwave oven makes two appearances, roughly compensating the unaccounted dishwasher energy at the beginning of the record. In total, this capture represents 660 Wh of energy expended. I don’t have much insight into the meanings of the various pulses, other than the general observation that the early big pulses must represent the wash phase, and the later period must involve rinsing and possibly heating—though we generally don’t use the high temperature wash option and turn off heated dry.

Pages: 1 2 3 4 5 6