A mystery - why are refrigertors so inefficient? I have an 80 year old classic 6 cuFt box that draws on average 12KWH per month - about one half that any of the 1000 listed energy star units use… The compressor is huge and it’s manual defrost…

I looked at the formula for energy star and it’s something like 248 + (K x CuFt) - per year KWH… so 0 CuFt box still draws 248KWH!?

I managed to get my monthly consumption down to <60KWH for 2 months - one person power is about 75w [400watt pulses not for long] - about 54KWH with bike going 24/7…. Interestingly 1 sqFt sunshine is about one person power and 1 KWH is about what a muscular laborer can put out in a long day… as well as 1000 pounds can be lifted by 1 KWH to a height of 1/2 mile - I think our issue in part is to get people in touch with how much power they use in some personal physical terms - Sysiphus was not a happy dude as he couldn’t plug into a pile of coal to move that rock up the hill :-)

There’s another thing to consider as we get into electric autos [I'm a bicyclist but think electrics would be a step in the right direction] - the cost of energy containers i.e. batteries - over life cycle the cost of storing energy in good Li cells is about $1/KWH! - That’s aside from the cost of the energy used to charge the battery… I hope we find some cheaper technologies for storage - paying $30 for a one use gas can wouldn’t be accptable but is similar to battery cost/energy content…

These aren’t hard numbers just provocative ones… We need some lighter weight autos and more use of the original hybrid - the diesel electric locomotive drawn trains!

Less power to us! ride on! prem

Basically, yeah: 1 Therm of gas can give you about the same amount of usable heat as 25 KWH of electricity. I used 95% efficiency for heat and 80% efficiency for gas which accounts for the difference (along with using 3,412 BTU per KWH per Google): (100000 BTU * 0.80) / (3412 BTU * 0.95) BTU = 24.7, the number I got.

As for solar, that’s what I get intuitively, but almost $60/watt puts it in perspective. Of course, once you get down to needing an average draw of <100 watts or so, then even grid electricity becomes absurdly cheap … or, rather than solar panels, use a couple generators hooked to exercise bikes.

A cool figure is 1 watt costs $1/year at about 11.3cents / KWH - in order to dispalce 1 watt 24/7 with PV costing $10/peak watt with 1.5 KWH generated per peak watt per year [partly sunny partly night!] - capital cost of PV to displace one watt with PV panel is ((365.25 x 1 x 24)/1500) x $10 = $58.44 which is a good argument for conserving every watt drain!