Re:The humble USB cable is part of an electrical revolution
by XorNot on Tuesday October 22, 2013 @11:35AM
(#6592571)
The problem with "buy high quality wall socket supplies" is that it is impossible these days to tell where the line is between "high quality, but off-brand" and "low quality, being sold at a huge mark up".
Re:The humble USB cable is part of an electrical revolution
by legitsource on Tuesday October 22, 2013 @12:48PM
(#6593155)
I learned a few years back that higher cost doesn't necessarily equal high quality.
Re:The humble USB cable is part of an electrical revolution
by VLM on Tuesday October 22, 2013 @10:34AM
(#6592155)
"power transmission with DC is actually quite a lot more efficient than AC."
And the subject to google for is insulation breakdown and compare the equations relating peak voltage and RMS voltage. Intuitively you need to insulate a high power transmission line to handle the highest voltage it'll ever see at any instant, which and unfortunately the peak voltage is a microscope amount of time at the tiny peak of the sine wave, but the DC equivalent power you can get out of a sine wave is only the much lower RMS voltage, whereas a DC line can carry peak power continuously, so for a given line $100M budgeted toward cable insulation can insulate more power if its sent as DC rather than AC.
I'm not completely convinced that this makes sense though. Any low voltage DC distribution network will need fairly thick wires to distribute anything but trivial power levels. The power lost in the cables over tens or hundreds of feet would probably make any efficiency gains fairly moot. The efficiency of modern switched mode power supplies is fairly high, and my understanding is that the no-load power use is almost trivial (milliamps).
One issue that seems to have surfaced recently is that there's loads of very, very cheap AC-DC power supplies which are awfully made. It would definitely make sense for a single high quality supply over a bunch of cheap, noisy and dangerous ones, but I think the best solution is investing slightly in wall-socket based power supplies of a known quality.
As an aside, power transmission with DC is actually quite a lot more efficient than AC. The reason AC won the power race was the ease of voltage change with transformers. As solid state power electronics improves, we're going to see more and more DC based transmission lines. We're probably centuries away from a DC grid (if ever).