Let’s get the vampire devices or phantom load business done with first. One of the problems with the web is people copy/pasting stuff without checking first. So we can find shed loads of articles all citing a report done by British gas about how people can save £110 a year by turning off their “vampire devices”. These are appliances that consume electricity when on stand-by mode or are always on. The report was based on a 2015 study done in California. British gas decided that it could base their report on a 7 year old study done in a place that doesn’t resemble the UK that much. The study includes things like heated toilet seats, the existence of which I was sadly unaware …. Technology has changed a lot since 2015 and the 2009/125/EC - Ecodesign Directive has had an impact in Europe and devices are generally much more efficient today. So despite what the boffins at British gas say you most probably cannot save £110 a year by “flicking a switch”.
All that said it is still worthwhile switching off, at the mains, those devices that don’t need to be “always-on”. Might be worth checking if we really need these things!
Right … onto the tea bit and some parasite loads.
The English are renowned worldwide as heavy tea drinkers, this is strange considering that the amount of tea drunk per person per year is highest in Turkey and more is consumed in Ireland than the UK. Anyway Brits use about 1.94 kg of tea per person per year.
97% of UK households own an electric kettle, 90% use it every day and around 40% use it 5 times a day and more.
Electric kettles are designed to turn off at 100°c , people use their kettles to boil water to make a cup of tea, coffee or a herbal tea :
Green tea 80 - 85°C
Black tea, there is some debate about this but 85 °C seems fine especially for Oolongs.
Coffee, 90 - 96°C
Herbal tea/tisanes, 100°C
So only herbal teas need boiling water, which is what the kettles are designed to give. Yes, in some countries you might well want to boil the water to kill off bacteria but this is done for you in the UK and in many other countries before it arrives in your tap.
Let’s take 90°c as a compromise for the ideal temperature for making black tea. I need water at 90° and the kettle boils it at 100° so some how much energy wasted :
To take 1 litre of water from 90°C, what I want, to 99°C, what the kettle will give me (the online calculator didn’t go up to 100°!) uses 10 watt hours (Wh)
So if (I’m ignoring the efficiency of the different kettles which are variable) :
Kettle used once a day = 10 Wh (0.01Kwh) = 365 Wh a year (3.65 Kwh) wasted
Kettle used 5 times a day = 50 Wh (0.05 Kwh) = 18,250 Wh a year (18.25 Kwh) wasted
Stop! They cry. “You can get temperature controlled kettles!”
The cheapest basic kettle I could see online (UK) was £14,95, cheapest temperature controlled kettle £18,50. The £3,55 difference might not seem much to some people but is a lot to others. I was in the UK recently and had a look in some charity shops, none of the 2nd hand kettles available were temperature controlled.
So that is parasite waste built into the machine.
On top of the above three quarters of British households overfill their kettles. The Energy Saving Trust estimate that this wastes around £68 million each year.
And finally as an aside : the cheaper kettles are made from plastic. They often have labels saying Bisphenol A free which is nice…… except that Bisphenol S which is a common replacement is also associated with health risks for example a study found that BPS speeds up embryonic development and disrupts the reproductive system in animals.
Some stuff just has waste built in and then of course we can also use them wastefully.
Take trains …. in France we got TGVs which translates as Very Fast Trains (tell it as it is so to speak and is less prosaic than Shinkansen (the Japanese ‘bullet train') which translates as ‘New main line’). The TGVs are fast and they are equipped with modern electric motors which are much much more efficient than the motors installed on trains in the 1950’s. So that should mean that the modern trains use a lot less electricity. Well it would mean that except everyone wants to get somewhere else as fast as possible, or so we’re told, and air resistance increases with the square of speed, the power needed to overcome air drag increases with the cube of the speed so, as an example, at 200 km/h you need 4 times as much power as at 100 km/h.
At top of the list of parasite loads is of course housing, “Unfortunately, most new and retrofitted buildings use much more energy than predicted by computer models at design stage, up to 250% more, the so-called ‘energy performance gap” 250%! Think of a car you just been sold, you were told that it uses 5 litres of fuel to do 100 km, when you drive it you find it uses 12.5 litres/100 km you’d probably try and sue the geezer who sold it to you!