That's about 150W sustained. So 1500W for a large sign, that's like 150 high power LED light bulbs, I guess that checks out.
Anything that reduces ads in the public sphere is fine by me.
Statistisches Bundesamt says it's 1,958 kwh. https://www.destatis.de/EN/Themes/Society-Environment/Enviro...
Interestingly, for 2 person households they state 3,196 kwh and for 3+ person households 4,919 kwh. Energy consumption scales worse than I expected. I assumed there would be more synergy in shared households.
I guess there are just a lot more appliances in use today and we're more lazy.
When I, approaching my 40s, compare our household with my parents household when I was a child there a various notable changes in habits:
- My mother hang the loundry to dry. We seldomly do this anymore, instead we're using a dryer. These things are insanely power-hungry.
- Electronics for entertainment and communication: A landline phone, a TV (for the evening news), a radio + casette player. Now I'm powering/charging at least 10 devices (like mobile, laptop, smart watch, tablet) at any given time.
- When dark outside, about 3 100W light bulbs would illumate the living space for 5 people. Now we have „power-saving” LEDs. But a lot of them. So many, I can't even compare them.
- When it was hot, well, you endure it. Now we have three ventilators (others start to use ACs, which has always been a very awkward thing to do in Germany).
Edit: I come to think, while a lot has to do with being lazy, another lot has to do with being selfish. Things like hanging the loundry. We use the dryer, so we safe time to do more productive things like working on our careers.
The air will do it for free!
We have a space-efficient drying rack so we can dry indoors.
Still, drying clothes indoors has no ill effects, I have no idea where you got this. It's definitely better than exposing them to high temperatures like in most apartment tumble driers.
Maybe the first is why you think the second is always true? Where I live if I just leave laundry on a drying rack it won't dry for days, and once it is dryish it already smells stale and mouldy.
I'm glad that it works for you, but maybe the advice differs based on location, climate, maybe even architectural choices.
They started out right and acknowledged that things can be different in different climates. But then in their second paragraph they made a categorical statement: “Still, drying clothes indoors has no ill effects, I have no idea where you got this.”
That is a general statement. They don’t think drying clothes indoors can have any ill effects. Ever. At any humidity level.
So they realise that the drying time can change quantitatively. What they miss is that there are qualitative effects which can happen too. And in their hurry they dismiss other people’s lived experience.
> Also things like sheets and towels really should not be left to dry indoor.
Can you elaborate on both statements? I currently leave everything, including sheets and towels, to air dry indoors.
Heat pump or condensing dryers may well be a better option.
Almost certainly the perfect solution will be situational. I mean, if your house is too dry in the winter, a bit of extra humidity might even be a feature, after all...
Winter air tends to be much drier than summer air, so much so that my bath towels dry on the rack in the winter overnight, but may stay damp for a whole day in the summer.
That said, water will condense at heat bridges (?)(poorly/not insulated parts of the wall) in the winter, causing mold, if the place is poorly insulated.
Where I lived before, that's still 80% (usually 90-95% in summer)
I don't have space (I live in an apartment), but I regularly did this in England. It takes slightly more time to hang them out vs. stuff them in the dryer, and (in England) you need to keep an eye on the weather, but they end up smelling fresher.
A good dose of UV light probably helps.
More generally because the climate in central Europe is not like Arizona, Utah, New Mexico, California but hospitable during the summer season without AC.
AC makes it more comfortable during hot days but it is still doable without.
This is only true for private households. Since 10 years ACs are widely used in a business environment.
Overall, it's only added about 15-20kWh to our monthly usage. (2-person household, about 200kWh/month average)
> What on earth are people spending electricity on?
It's exactly that. An AC, probably one additional appliance among others, adds another 10% to the total and somehow we manage to frame this as efficient and thus the right thing to do.
This gets you air conditioning literally for free, and you get to be the one to frown at your neighbors for continuing to burn something to stay warm.
Air-to-water heat pumps still only change the temperature of water, which is practically only useful for heating.
I thought the idea that offices set thermostats to an actual standard instead of just whoever cries the loudest or has the most power to be almost laughable, so I looked for the "study" she got it from. Indeed, I don't remember the details, but the governmental bureaucracy involved in recommending HVAC did actually use a formula that was obsolete and didn't consider women. However, there was zero evidence in the study that anyone actually used that formula in consideration of anything.
https://deine-mobile-klimaanlage.de/abluftschlauch/
Anecdotally, doors within an apartment/house are also far less airtight than in the US.
(Germans take airflow in homes extremely seriously; es zieht / frische Luft! is perhaps the fundamental contradiction in the German culture.)
And then there's the main PC setup, running maybe 12hrs a day (inc. WFH). And that was build for gaming, so it's quite power-hungry, especially when the GPU is kept busy, working on Unity projects.
I don't know any non-techy person who isn't using a laptop exclusively, and then pretty rarely, as most things nowadays happen on the smart phone. AC is non-existent in Germany. So I'm really curious. I have a 24/7 Homeserver and laptop, and am at ~1200kwh a year.
Two questions though: how common are TVs in Germany? And how common is electric hot water for showers/baths? My sample size is pretty small (and mostly limited to Berlin).
Hot water mostly comes from central heating with gas, some homes in my city have district heating. At least up until now, electric heating, be it for water or the whole apartment was way to expensive so that you'd only consider that if you really have no other choice, for example, an old building from 100+ years ago with retrofitted central heating might have an electric water heater for the kitchens as they only did the bathrooms.
While we might not be close to the average consumption in Germany, because our house is quite new, I'm regularly wondering what other households are doing with that much energy.
I have lived in both countries and it didn't feel like there was much of a difference in electricity consumption.
LEDs and laptop instead of desktop computers lowered these stats quite a lot for me. I'm sure if I bought a newer fridge it would also help.
I use more than that by myself per month. Granted, I have all electrical appliances, heat, and a car, but even without those I have to imagine I'd still use significantly more.
Thank god for being on hydro I guess.
Heat pumps have >100% efficiency, which makes them stand way out at the top, but they're an exception rather than the rule.
Wow that is low. In most states in the South average household consumes that per month. https://www.chooseenergy.com/news/article/the-states-that-us...
That's what happens when you live in cardboard houses in the middle of a literal desert.
In Europe more people live in better build houses or flats with centralised heating and no AC. I used 1500kwh last years while working full time from my living room and spent maybe 100 euros on heating
In US more people live in very hot places like Texas and Arizona and people mostly live in single-family houses. Single-family houses obviously takes more energy to cool than "flats". Plus average American house/flat has twice the living area.
this is extremely, extremely low. No heating, no cooling, no hot water, no car charging. A fridge alone tends to be over 400KW/h.
Edit: polycaster listed close to 5kWh/year for 3+ household. 1person being 2k. So, extremely low estimate.
Newer devices sold in the EU are relatively energy efficient. A typical fridge-freezer combo uses 150kWh.
That would be a small <150L E class fridge, kept at 21C (with an air conditioner during the summer)
Fridge efficiency has not increased much in the last decades (LG infamously had an efficient but horrendously unreliable 'linear compressor') - the only part that can increase efficiency is the time(s) it gets opened and how good seals the fridge has, and ambient temperature. Also smaller compressor by design cannot be super efficient.
The newer devices part doesn't affect fridges all that much - vacuum cleaners have been limited, lightning requires LEDs (effectively) - which comes w/ its own issue of retrofitting, TVs (also relying on LEDs for backlight or OLED directly), power factor correction (for 75+W) and what not. Direct drive (brushless DC) and low temp washing for washing machines. Yet, there is no recent groundbreaking technology, it's just that the EU changed the efficiency labeling to prevent massive A+++ stuff.
https://www.otto.de/p/samsung-kuehl-gefrierkombination-bespo...
273l fridge plus 114l freezer, modeled power draw 134kWh. This is a premium product, a less expensive model (similar capacity) takes 166kWh.
https://www.otto.de/p/samsung-kuehl-gefrierkombination-rl36t...
Either way, I wanted to know what the actual power draw of those signs is, and since it was given in multiples of a (German) single household, well, that's probably about the number they are working with.
This often only applies to heating the rooms. Boiling/heating water for cleaning dishes and bathing is often done via electricity in a boiler.
Waschmaschine and Dryer are almost on a daily basis used (the dryer is used less during hot season)
If you tend to buy energetic-efficient devices, your power bill is lower, in front of higher costs for the equipment.
And how do you achieve this? What is your energy source for heating?
Besides, in Germany we don’t say “Car charging”, we say “eat healthy and ride your bike”.
'eat healthy and ride your bike' my ass
For one of the richest countries with one of the biggest car industries being only 25th is a great achievement in mobility. Yes, we could do better, but just compare it to the default country (#7 in car ownership, #2 if you exclude microstates).
>obesity rates above average than EU
47th in the global ranking, after Iceland. And USA is right after Oceania. It depends on the perspective.
Among the EU, Germans rank 6th on car ownership per capita (2020 data).
Going these together, and it shows within the EU, Germans are the on the top of km per capita and not 'we drive less than others' (except maybe the US)
Your reply to someone asking about charging their EV(thus need to drive) was that in Germany that isn't a problem because there you eat healthy and cycle, which is a lie (you drive more than most/all of the EU). (as per cycling data, DE is 7th on daily usage of bikes in the EU, but couldn't find any data regarding number of kilometres though)
The only East European country that can possible change the stats would be Poland (but personally I don't believe that) - the rest are just too small.
Also would not brag about public transport, - most of your rich neighbours do better.
Chain smoker laughing at a lung patient.
Of course, geothermal pumps are still a better option than most.
I have a fridge and my water is heated with electricity, I still end up at ~1500kwh per year, while working from home everyday.
Electric heating and cooling is extremely inefficient and barely used in Europe.
And I work from home on a gaming desktop...
The max efficacy woulod be 683 lm/w. Blue LEDs can reach 1/3 of the theoretical maximum.
Like, I'm sure we can agree high power LEDs have gigantic heatsinks and fans for other reasons than cosmetic.
https://hackaday.com/2021/01/17/leds-from-dubai-the-royal-li...
Looks like they're bringing this idea to the rest of the world:
https://www.lighting.philips.co.uk/consumer/p/led-bulb/87195...
The second thing is white paint. You need less outdoor lighting if the built environment absorbs less light.
In the 1800s the steam engine was the most efficient way of producing work from heat, but that still didn't make it objectively efficient.
If you asked me to build a house and I threw away more than half of the bricks you'd call me crazy. But when it comes to leds it's called "incredible efficiency". It's only efficient in comparison to the other options, not in any objective sense.
Now sure there are subcategories where 100% efficiency is the maximum theoretical efficiency (like the carnot cycle limit of 37% for heat engines), but that's already misleading info if not specified.
There is a widespread belief that Advertising serves no purpose to humanity.
Advertising is like anything in life: In high doses it is harmful. In lower doses it is useful. If there are regulators in your country that prevent advertisers from making false claims, even better.
Advertising has helped me hone onto products and services in my whole life that I've found useful. Many times I would have not been able to find the product or service if it were not for that advertisement. [You could claim that I was "brainwashed" into buying that product but that could be applied to any interaction in life. For example, if my spouse convinced me to do something, it usually means the logic was sound and it is highly unlikely that I was brainwashed to do her bidding].
No one likes being aggressively marketed to. No one likes being duped. But there is a space for advertising that is gentler, honest and educational.
Think of advertising as a way of companies to say "Hey! here's something we're proud of -- please have a look. By selling to you, the customer, we can make a profit and you can get the benefit from our product". Advertising can be a win-win.
Advertising can allow manufacturing at scale. It has helped bring about many the marvels of technology that would have cost millions of dollars a few decades ago to be just a few hundred (e.g. our laptops that are more powerful than supercomputers of of the 1990s). Without advertising many companies may not have reached the sales volume to keep bringing down costs year after year.
I could go on. Adverting is useful. Bad actors must be weeded out. However, Advertising in itself is useful.
I cannot recall one single advertisement I ever saw in my life, other than some institutional/non-profit ads, which remotely fits that idyllic description. So it's really a moot point. "What if advertising were just calm factual information", well but it's not! It's definitely not! It's psychological warfare of moderate-to-high intensity. So what use is pretending it's something it's not? It's very disingenuous to pretend it can ever be "gentle, honest, and educational" (lol)
I also don't see how advertising is responsible for chip mass-production and Moore's law.
When it comes to something like buying a car, I don't want to be advertised to since the manufacturer of that product 1) isn't a part of my community and 2) isn't supported by the people in my area.
I can absolutely think of cases where I would have liked to know what services are available for specific products, like chair making, or a project I have in mind, rather than having to ask around to figure out who even does it in my area. Obviously, I would still have to do some research to figure out if the person advertising is any good, but the fact that a small business has a budget for advertising is a very positive indicator that they are at least professional enough to have some revenue.
Advertising, when it relates to something a small business can exist within, reduces the amount of time and effort I have to put in to seeing how many competitors are in that space. It's not something that I'm thrilled about, but it does have benefit within certain circumstance.
We had this, it was called phone books. And I guess a phone book is technically advertising, but there's clearly a difference between info and manipulation.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yellow_pages
I don't mind advertising whenever I am actively looking for something.
What I have problems with is seeing ads when I don't want to see them.
Total disagree. New trends, improvements communicate itself one or the other way. If I want a new X, I'd rather research on my own, best are objective tests, or worse then selective advertisements I choose to view.
Even non-aggressive mild advertisements that just try to snatch my attention involuntarily are just not needed and a pain. The world could be much better without that crap.
I don't buy the argument that advertisements were necessary for manufacutring at scale, any source?
> Think of advertising as a way of companies to say "Hey! here's something we're proud of -- please have a look.
Erm wtf what, no, just no, leave me alone please. I want to find you in a dedicated magazine / tests / reviews if your something is something I currently want, otherwise this attention grab is hostile.
There’s a qualitative argument there as well, and whether to value not having to pay for ad-supported publications and services, but that’s essentially the question in the preference for or against advertising: who pays and who gets paid to make the right buyers and sellers aware of each other.
I'd go even further: have different platforms compete as "and serving" places, basically opt-in targeted advertising sites. They aren't allowed to use any external data, just a questionnaire and your behaviour on the platform, and the user must choose to go to the site by entering it into their browser or looking it up on Google. No ads anywhere else.
If ads are truly as beneficial as you describe, people will go for it. Let the market decide whether ads are good for the consumer
I don't disagree, but there are a few points that I see differently.
First of all, I think that what you're looking for is promotion, that is based on someone or some entity promoting your products and services, putting their face on it and leveraging their reputation of connoisseur of the matter at hand. It's based on trust and works best especially for tech products
Nobody buy smartphones based on adv, well except iPhone users that buy the brand iPhone - that could be seen as a confirmation of the trust based promotion, they trust Apple -, people watch reviews on YouTube channels that they trust.
Advertising is low effort. it's usually someone writing a script for you, pretending to be you, that it is the company that is talking directly to you, but it's in fact an agency that wrote a claim and a story to tell, to actually sell, not promote, the service or product in question by exploiting your feelings.
Secondly, I don't believe that advertising made laptops affordable, research did.
Super computers still cost millions and are an order or two of magnitude more powerful than you regular laptop of today.
What?? If there ever was proof that HN is completely clueless about reality not empathetic of their fellow humans. Ads are not brainwashing.
The simple answer is that the real disconnect is thinking that since someone comments on HN, he is some kind of a mythical creature.
I am a middle aged man from Italy that saw mobile phones birth when was 20 already.
Don't assume that your experience is my experience.
Nobody I know closely knows what HN is, they ask me what phone to buy or which laptop, because I've always been the "techie" of the family/group of friends and because they care about not wasting their money but can't navigate the bullshit they see in the ads.
I guess that "blast past fast" or "do what you can" don't really say anything about the device true capabilities and why one should spend their money to buy it.
unless the reason is "I will buy whatever rich people buy" or "I like the colour of this one"
Of course the iPhone ads work, because they don't promote the phone, they sell a way of life, a lifestyle, their target is the "cool kids" that want to be "content creators" and that appeals to their desire to be part of what is fashionable among their peers, but that's exactly what brainwashing is.
Ads is brainwashing and it's scientifically weaponized against the reference target.
repetita iuvant: they don't promote the product, they exploit your sentiments, desires, fears, whatever works, to make you buy the product. But are actually a bunch of lies.
Stopp invading my space (public spaces, software, websites), and put ads there for people that are interested in being suggested products they might like. And, instead of tracking all my activity, put a form that I can fill out with the details I am comfortable with.
Not gonna happen, because they're paying people and companies to annoy you with the ads almost nobody wants to see
The random road signs for biggest bank in the land, or one of the three telecom companies in the land, or for things like well known beverages is quite ridiculous. Almost everyone knows these companies exist already.
Examples: - Obvious ads vs. sneaky product placements - There should be spaces/times without ads allowed
Another thing that makes me wonder is big know companies (soda for example) constantly making ads. This is not the case of "Hey we made something new" as literally everybody knows the product for years. This constant cognitive exposure has some similarities to propaganda. We are not allowed to forget them.
> But there is a space for advertising that is gentler, honest and educational.
This pretty much sums it up really good.
Do you like being approach on the street by solicitors? Personally, I hate it. When I’m walking, I appreciate undisturbed personal space. I feel the same way about advertising. I don’t care that the company is proud. I want my personal space undisturbed. You can show me something if I ask, but to assume I care to see anything you have to offer is rude.
It's worse than that. Advertising persuades people to buy ever more stuff they don't need, thereby causing enormous damage to the planet. Advertising is among the top of things we should ban to reduce climate change.
There is no such thing as honest advertising. The conflict of interest is inherent. The best information comes from third parties but even that gets corrupted by advertisers eventually.
> Think of advertising as a way of companies to say "Hey! here's something we're proud of -- please have a look.
When I want companies talking to me about products, I'll visit their website or I'll open their store app. In those cases it's not even advertising but information. I asked to see the products. Advertising is by definition an intrusion, uninvited.
Most of the time I don't want companies talking to me about offers. Their insistence is abuse.
That ideal of advertising you described is virtually non-existent. It's generally manipulation of the lowest sort concocted by sociopathic people.
This is obviously untrue. Not only can a merchant engage in only honest advertising, there are those who do.
There's a conflict of interest every time a married man has a drink with an interested woman. That doesn't mean he cheats.
This is highly political and that 'belief' is indeed often ideological.
Free flow of information and awareness of products and services on offer is an important aspect of an open society and free market economics.
I think this has a lot to do with the fact that the alternatives that have been tried have historically been either failures or catastrophes.
I don't like political arguments on hn but if you're truly interested I can try to summarise them when I get home later.
And the latter is fully achievable still without everything that is "advertising" today.
We're in a crisis and they want to waste energy we might need for heating households to manipulate people into buying shit they don't need?
That's not exactly a position that'll get them a lot of sympathy.
This is encouraged by our system, switching off screens at night won't change it. Attack the root cause not the very last symptom
But sure, let's stop using plastic straws and switch off our routers at night while we continue absolutely ravaging this planet
[0] https://www.tagesschau.de/wirtschaft/technologie/led-reklame...