Sunday, July 21, 2013

Household Power Use: Fan, Hair Clippers, Paper Shredder

Got bored, decided to measure the power consumption of a few household items. More accurately, I measured things that wouldn't require too much work to unplug and move around.

Check out the videos below for a box fan, three different hair clippers, a 12V power drill battery charger, and a paper shredder. Note that these aren't representative of anything but the makes and models of the products that I have in my possession. And there's no guarantee that the meter's accurate.

Box Fan
After seeing what looked like a label saying that the maximum power consumption for the box fan was 0.9A, I was expecting a power use over 100W. Luckily, my lack of understanding in all things electrical meant that this wasn't true. This fan only topped out at around 90W (assuming the meter's accurate) even at its highest setting. It has three settings and the video shows that each increment lowers the power use by about 10W.

Hair Clippers
The biggest highlight was probably the Oster Classic 76. Whereas the Oster Fast Feed and Andis BGRC clippers only used less than 15W (assuming the meter's accurate), the Classic 76 used a whopping 50W. Even worse is that I only turned them on and didn't put it, or the others, under any load.

Paper Shredder
This one makes me feel bad about all that paper shredding I had to do at my first job. I used to do boxes of shredding the office saved up and I'd produce entire garbage bags full of paper. The shredder I checked out used over 100W when loaded with an envelope folded in half, which should have been roughly four pages thick. Being so narrow, a proper letter sized page may use more. When just turned on in the reverse position, the shredder only used about 75W (assuming the meter's accurate). Surprisingly, the "off" setting used less than 0.5W while the stand-by was 1.0W.

Battery Charger
I hadn't used or charged the battery to my cheapo 12V power drill in a while, so I thought I'd plug it in to see what I'd find anyways. Not bad, this charger only used about 6.5W (assuming the meter's accurate) while being charged.


Related
Usefulness of a Sound Level Meter
UV Beads: How to See Ultraviolet Light Indoors
Wearing earplugs in theaters, subways, concerts, everywhere!