mercredi 16 août 2017

Is household DC in our future?

After the riveting discussion of different AC voltage schemes used by different countries I thought a bit about what consumes electricity in my home. While the supply is purely AC, an awful lot of it is actually consumed as DC. Most of my electronics convert the AC to DC and most of my LED lights do the same. I was even looking at an AirCon unit that had a DC compressor. Admittedly, most of the fans and bigger appliances are built for AC and would be clumsy to manage on DC.

I remember watching a house being built over a decade ago and the owner paying for Cat-5 cable to every room to connect various computers. He has a wi-fi router now that makes all that wire superfluous so I asked him if he regrets it. He said the cost was rather minimal and seemed a good idea at the time.

That made me think that it would be a similar cost to run a parallel DC power system to handle the lighting and light electronics load of the home. The advantage would be a single high end central AC to DC converter instead of a hundred cheap ones throughout the house. It would also allow any onsite solar to be used as DC instead of inverting to AC and then converting back to DC.

I haven't really thought this all the way through or done the math on it, but when I count the number of small converters around my house it does seem odd. Every LED light, every wall wort, every USB converter, they just seem to add up to a lot of inefficiency. Maybe I'm completely wrong, maybe all those little converters are quite efficient.


via International Skeptics Forum http://ift.tt/2x4IwYo

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