is there any reason NOT to just let the empeg sit at home with the little blinky light blinking?
or is it better to cut power from the wall when not really in use.
(on for days at a time)

I've had mine plugged into the wall pretty much since I got it several months ago, and have had no ill effects. I figure it's a mini computer, and since I leave my other computers on constantly (current uptime 36+ days, last rebooted for a kernal upgrade), I see no reason why the empeg wouldn't be the same...

My Mk1 sits in my stereo rack going blinky-blinky 24/7/365.

The only reason you might want to unplug it is if you're afraid a power surge will damage it. But if you're surge-protected, should be fine.

What about leaving it playing for long periods of time?

It was designed to play large amounts of music - wouldn't be much good if you had to switch it off every few hours!

You might want to choose a non static visual if you're going to leave the player on for days/weeks/months to avoid burn in of the screen.

Rob

Well, the obvious reason is that it consumes electrical power when plugged in, which is very expensive (money and environment) to produce simply to waste again as heat. And if the building is air-conditioned, multiply that again by more power required to remove that heat from the building.

Quite wasteful. And Californians wonder about their electricity problems.. (dunno where you are, but Tony's in California).

-ml

What heat? It can't be using more than a couple of watts in standby mode.

And our electricity problems were the result of poor political leadership and corrupt companies, but that is a subject for another thread.

And our electricity problems were the result of poor political leadership and corrupt companies, but that is a subject for another thread


Actually, it's a lot worse than just that. The USA consumes 25% of the World's energy with just 4% of the population, and 65% of the US' electricity comes from coal, which is a limited resource.

IIRC from the Discovery programme I watched recently, it is estimated are that the global consumption is currently 10TW, and the predictions suggest that figure will quadruple by 2030, as India, China, Pakistan and other populous developing countries all get their cars, TVs, computers etc.

They can't see any way to easily produce 40TW, even taking into account oil, coal, solar energy, wind and nuclear sources.

But you're right...this is a discussion for another thread

and 65% of the US' electricity comes from coal, which is a limited resource.

That's because the NRC has made it next to impossible to build any new nuclear power plants. It's good that there are safety regulations and checks and balances to prevent another Chernobyl, but I think they've overstepped their bounds in many areas and completely stifled the motivation to research new, better, and safer forms of nuclear engergy production.

We also have 1/4 of the world economy.

i dig the new icon Yz33d!

In your dreams, man.









Well, actually it depends on how you define "world economy". If you define it by the amount of money transfered in exchange for products and services, than you might be right (but I doubt that). If you are using fairer measures (like umber of hours worked, amount of resources used...), you will very likely get to about 1/8th of the world economy at best. Still an achievement, but far from 25%.

cu,
sven

I have 2 of them blinking away at me 24/7. Or maybe I shouldn't admit to wasting the energy now

In reply to:

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Well, the obvious reason is that it consumes electrical power when plugged in, which is very expensive (money and environment) to produce simply to waste again as heat. And if the building is air-conditioned, multiply that again by more power required to remove that heat from the building.

Quite wasteful. And Californians wonder about their electricity problems.. (dunno where you are, but Tony's in California).

---

Which is why my home docking station has a built in 240volt microswitch at the back of the docking sled that only closes and powers up the docking station when the empeg is fully inserted.

To power my docking station down completely so it uses no power, I simply pull the empeg out slightly [about 1/2 an inch] which means its still pretty secure in the docking stattion, but the power supply is turned off.

While the power saved by this idea is small, we all have to start somewhere and the cost of the microswitch and wiring was only a dollar or two. While it is quite likely that the power savings over 5 years will not exceed the cost of putting this feature into my docking station, you wonder why bother?

The cost to the country and the planet of building more power stations (even if they are renewable power sources) makes it worth while.

RE: Californian power shortages.

Your comment about the air conditioning using lots of power to remove excess heat is a good point.

I recall seeing a program about the power shortages in California and the program commentator blamed the dot com companies (or those still left - the program/news item was made last year) for causing the power shortages.

Their comments related to how easy a data center housing tens or hundreds of rack mounted servers could be setup almost overnight anywhere in California, causing a massive stress on local utility companies resources - these utility companies don't know the data centers are there and can't plan the wiring and other infrastructure in advance and they can come and go quickly.

They mostly blamed the computers (rack mounted servers) for wasting lots of power.

All of which are probably quite valid comments, but the point about power usage that they seemed to miss is that the computers themselves probably aren't that excessive in terms of power usage - its the air conditioning required to remove any excess heat from the secure 'bunker' that the computers are located in for security reasons, and from the rest of the building where the people in the building are thats the biggest user of power, not the computers themselves.
You could argue that the heat has to be removed due to inefficient processor and other components that require excess cooling - to some extent that is true.

I guess the point is:
don't overlook the heat issue as its a hidden 'cost' most people don't even consider when talking about power usage.

In reply to:

---

That's because the NRC has made it next to impossible to build any new nuclear power plants. It's good that there are safety regulations and checks and balances to prevent another Chernobyl, but I think they've overstepped their bounds in many areas and completely stifled the motivation to research new, better, and safer forms of nuclear engergy production.

---

The reason why nuclear power plants are no longer built in the US and most other countries in the world is that experience over the last 40+ years has showed that the Nuclear power industry has failed to live up to most of its promises.

Talk of "power too cheap to meter" in the fifties and sixties overlooked the real long term costs of building, operating and then safely decommisioning (and then safely storing the radioactive wastes produced during the operation and decomissioning phases) any nuclear power plant.

A nuclear power plant may operate for 25 years and produce lots of electricity during that time - but the cost of decommisioning the plant (and then storing the left over radioactive waste produced from it) is a substantial portion of (if not more than) the value of the electricity generated in that time.

The current method of dealing with most nuclear plants that have reached the end of their operating lives is to remove all radioactive fuel from the power core, then leave it for future generations to deal with.

The UK government is still coming to grips with the cost of cleaning up the sites where existing power plants are operating (or have ceased operating).

The length of time until the site is rendered a 'green fields' site again is generally placed at a hundred or more years in the future and the cost in decomissioning a plant is literally staggering.

Its so large, the UK government (i.e. UK taxpayers) will likely to have to pay for this cost even though many of these nuclear power plants were privatised in the 90's by the then government of the day.

This is not my opinion - these are agreed facts by experts in nuclear power, there are numerous sources where the costs of decomissioning is openly discussed.
And many places where the costs are not so openly discussed.

As far as I know there is no country in the world that has sucessfully fully decommissioned a commercial nuclear power plant - the costs of doing so are too high and/or unknown for anyone comtemplate doing so in the short to medium term.
[and no, simply putting a concrete 'tomb' around a nuclear power plant ala Chernobyl is not fixing the problem - its merely delaying it].

So future generations (our descendents) will have to pay for the true costs of the power generated now (and in the recent past) using nuclear power.

The long term costs of nuclear power generation may exceed the costs of developing and using other clean energy sources (or even cleaning up existing 'dirty' energy sources e.g. coal) instead.

BTW: I used to be very pro-Nuclear power, however once you do some reading and understand the true facts and costs of the situation, its hard to conclude that nuclear is a valid option, or that it ever was. In truth, many nuclear power plants were built to help increase (albeit in a small way) the stockpiles of fissile nuclear material (e.g. Plutonium) for nuclear weapons, generating power was a useful cover story.

Now, some people are proposing building more nuclear power plants to be able to 'burn' up the Plutonium no longer required for nuclear weapons - which sounds to me like digging a bigger hole to fill in the smaller hole you created earlier.

Hey thanks.

Smu,

From http://www.cia.gov/cia/publications/factbook/index.html

The US's GDP in 2000 was $10 trillion.
The gross world product in 2000 was $43.6 trillion.
It's not quite 1/4.

"The US economy continued its remarkable sustained prosperity, growing at 5% in 2000, although growth slowed in fourth quarter 2000; the US accounted for 23% of GWP. The EU economies grew at 3.3% and produced 20% of GWP. China, the second largest economy in the world, continued its strong growth and accounted for 10% of GWP. Japan grew at only 1.3% in 2000; its share in GWP is 7%"

I don't think you can really blame the dot coms for the california power shortage. Poor planning in general, perhaps... Building a real data center requires new construction and pleny of permits, so the utilities know how much power they're going to be using. "Good" data centers try to be located in between two power blocks and be hooked up to both for redundancy.

If you go back and look, you could see how long it's been since california built a new power plant. Growth in general can be blamed for part of the power shortage. However, a large part of the energy shortage was manufactured by companys profiteering off the semi-free market -- utilites had to charge a specified rate for each kilowatt, but they had to buy it on the "open" market. Instead of price, the only thing regulating demand was comercials asking us to do our laundry at night. That's bound to cause problems, and it did. I'm still waiting to find out where the billions that california poured into Enron went...

Matthew