Microwaves… electricity consumption

In one way everyone should have one of these electricity meters… in another way no one should… ever… they make you a complete energy geek. As I made coffee this morning I looked at the microwave, its green display blinked at me… and I thought… yes… I must… so here are the results

I have a 800W sharp microwave, nothing flashy.

When in standby (just plugged in… waiting) it consumes 3.5 watts of electricity. When heating stuff up at full power (it’s always at full power) it consumes 1250 watts. Now I’d say I use the microwave for an average of 5 minutes a day. So that is 1435 minutes sitting waiting, and 5 minutes of action. So doing the maths bit we find that…

My microwave consumes 45% of the electricity it consumes, sitting… waiting…

To put this into context, lets assume that there are 2 million microwaves in Ireland (every house, many businesses. Lets assume they are all on standby… all the time… That means that right now, microwaves on standby are consuming 7MW of electricity. If you prefer to think of it as wind turbines. Most of the wind turbines around are 1.5MW machines, and they generate an average of 1/3^rd of that. So there are 14 wind turbines needed in Ireland… so we can leave our microwaves sitting… waiting…

So what can I do you might ask? Plug it out, or switch off the socket. Boom. 3watts of electricity eliminated. The clever among you will realise that this rational can be extended to a lot of other electrical equipment around the house, but hold your horses, I’ll get a post out of each one of them yet!