[LINK] Australian energy efficiency standards for personalcomputers and monitors

[Karl Auer]

On Thu, 2007-10-18 at 10:29 +1000, grove at zeta.org.au wrote:
> come up with a much better standard and provide something useful that
> can drive hordes of them in a domestic or even audio situation....

When electrical power was first invented, it only drove big things -
motors and lights, and lights needed lots of current to make filaments
glow. Plus they needed relatively high voltages to make long-distance
transmission of power possible. A reasonable compromise for the power
equivalent of the local area network was found - well, two actually -
220 and 110 (and some variations on those themes).

Electronics and suchlike much lower-voltage applications came much, much
later, by which time the world was already wired. Given that there was
at the time no sense that power should be used sparingly, and that most
households had relatively few such devices, it made perfect sense to
just transform it down, ignoring the waste.

The wall wart invasion crept up on us. The right solution is probably to
wire everything for 12V as well as 240V, but that's probably some ways
off :-) especially as, at the moment, low power devices use a fairly
wide range of inputs. Laptops can use anything up to 18V or so, with 5V
being about the lowest most devices go. We would still be transforming
12V up and down.

Wall warts have disadvantages apart from the waste - they pose an
additional fire hazard, they are something else that can go wrong, they
are very often so big that they block adjacent sockets, and the wall
warts with inbuilt plugs are much harder for travellers to use,
especially in countries with recessed sockets.

Regards, K.

-- 
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Karl Auer (kauer at biplane.com.au)                   +61-2-64957160 (h)
http://www.biplane.com.au/~kauer/                  +61-428-957160 (mob)