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Webmaster was in on:
2025-02-09

The Moonspeaker:
Where Some Ideas Are Stranger Than Others...

Unexpected Energy Sinks (2024-10-28)

A rather vintage laptop docking station. January 2019 photograph by Raimond Spekking, via wikimedia commons under Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 4.0 International license. A rather vintage laptop docking station. January 2019 photograph by Raimond Spekking, via wikimedia commons under Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 4.0 International license.
A rather vintage laptop docking station. January 2019 photograph by Raimond Spekking, via wikimedia commons under Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 4.0 International license.

Energy usage is a fraught topic any time, although today because of the particular ways late stage capitalism demands energy waste while penalizing those who must strive to avoid wastage as much as possible because they can't afford it. Depending where we live and the options available, our big energy headaches may centre on gasoline for a vehicle, electricity in the household, natural gas in the furnace, heating oil or diesel. As more and more of us have rediscovered over the past decade or more, this is not just about the fuel source, it is also about the devices and machines we are seeking to fuel. Many of these have been redesigned to improve their efficiency at turning their fuel into whatever we hope and expect to get from them. More recently still, we can run again and again into devices designed to waste energy instead. And I do mean a general "us," not a coy reference to people so wealthy they may choose to drive giant gas-guzzling vehicles or heat houses with incredibly high ceilings as expressions of conspicuous consumption.

Several years ago, I moved to a different apartment, and as always, each building has its own profile in terms of electricity usage. The differences may be minor, or they may be more significant if the building is in an area where the climate allows for use of electric or natural gas heating. Accordingly, on moving to the new apartment, equipped with the usual average electric bill amount for the place, I settled in and began seeing how the reality would turn out in my case. It was going to be a bit different than I had encountered before due to my having the good fortune to be able to work from home the majority of the time. Therefore I had a work laptop with a dock, an addition compared to what I would usually have in regular use. The rather old fashioned docking station in the picture is far older and much bigger than the one that came with the work station I use now, although the sheer size makes it easier to see the extra ports they make available. So on this much more modern work station, I started out with a modern dock – I use the truncated name to suggest how much smaller this counterpart to the old one is, and alas, it has far fewer ports too. Its cooling fans whistle terribly, which was driving me gently crazy, to the point that I often resorted if not to headphones and music then ear plugs to curb the racket. Meanwhile, I was suffering some worry over the state of my electric bill, which was different enough from the established averages for the apartment to be a bit disturbing.

One day I finally could not stand the small but wretchedly noisy dock any longer. Work replaced it on warranty because it was not supposed to be making so much noise, and the unit had a known manufacturing flaw associated with overheating. Nevertheless, the new unit spent only a few weeks running more quietly, becoming at least as loud and annoying as its predecessor. Not seeing any point in trying for another warranty replacement, I checked the available ports on the laptop, and finding that with a few minor adjustments I could do without the dock altogether, packed it in its box and put it away. Now on occasion I noticed the fan in the power supply, but unlike the dock which whirred and whined, the power supply had a quiet whisper or hiss, and didn't run constantly.

And to my astonishment, my monthly electric bill dropped significantly and stayed consistently better due to my power usage going down from 30 to 40% each month. I checked all the other variables and the answer kept coming back the same: the change matched up in timing and consistency with the removal of the laptop dock. It had never occurred to me that these devices could be such power hogs, bearing in mind they are for laptops, and my work laptop is set to turn off the screen after a minimal period of idleness (including the telltale pauses entailed in reading a document), it has an SDD drive, and automatically suspends after 15 minutes of lack of input from the mouse or keyboard. In other words, my employer has quite conservative power usage settings in its laptop system images.

I am not claiming all laptop docks are electricity hogs like this one, it may be that it is from a series affected by a perfect storm of pandemic related manufacturing flaws plus bugs in the power management software. My point is that quite unexpected items can be adding to household or office electricity uses. We reasonably expect larger appliances to do so, but medium to small sized devices that run for at least the period of a work day may be punching above their weight, figuratively speaking.

Copyright © C. Osborne 2025
Last Modified: Sunday, February 09, 2025 18:38:28