Depends on the charger but either effectively zero or considerably less.
People get pissy about it, but think of electricity like water. Having a longer pipe is a negligible amount of water if the faucet is still off. And the faucet can only turn on if your device completes the circuit by being plugged in (and doing the appropriate handshakes)
That said, some chargers will consume a negligible amount of electricity to actively listen for a device. Think of it like the water in your toilet. Every so often enough evaporates or leaks that you hear it run a bit to refill. But mostly it is nothing until you flush.
I use a short lightning cable to plug my phone to my car for carplay. I just leave it plugged into the usb port (without the phone) when I’m not in the car. Do you think it’s slowly draining some energy from the car battery?
The cables themselves do not use power. It is the brick.
Your radio being off would not push any power through a cable. Also your cigarette lighter being off would not push any power. Which is why plugging it in won’t do anything.
To continue the metaphor - your water is turned off. You can’t use up water that isn’t there.
The reason the brick uses power is because it is available 24/7 for you to plug something in - and when you do - it can ask that device how much power it wants - does it have fast charging? Etcetera.
Thanks. About the cigarette lighter - my dashcam plugs into it but I always unplug it before I turn the car off so never noticed if the camera turns off along with the car. If it does, does that mean I can just keep the dashcam plugged in and it won’t draw power even though the camera is connected on the other end? Or does closing the circuit mean it will start drawing power?
The water analogy is perfectly fine for many situations, but the reason these don’t draw a lot of power when nothing is plugged in isn’t because a “valve is off”. There’s a transformer, so this is like two separate water lines. If the charger is plugged in, there’s always a closed circuit on the mains side of the transformer, even if there’s an open circuit on the DC side. See the first diagram here: circuitdigest.com/…/ac-to-dc-converter-circuit-di….
The reason new chargers don’t use as much power with no device attached is because of better design. If you checked an old charger or some crappy power supply, they’ll use a fair bit of power even with nothing on the DC side. It’s not enough that one would matter, but it is enough that there was an industry wide initiative to reduce phantom load resulting in new chargers that use almost nothing when nothing is on the DC.
A good rule of thumb is that the energy needs to go somewhere. So if the adapter was drawing a significant amount of power, it would get warm to the touch.
That’s true - And with a halfway decent thermal camera, you can see most of these unused chargers as “hot” spots. They’re so low power that they’re only slightly above ambient, but still something the cameras can see.
That’s how I found out that my desktop speakers consume power even with the physical button being off and status light dark. The power brick stays warm indefinitely, a good 20W feels like! I have to unplug that thing now when not in use. Any normal power brick will be <1W of course.
Yeah both the monitors and computers will consume a bit. Even a modern PC when turned off is in a type of deep sleep mode, for stuff like wake on LAN.
The chargers will hardly even register anything, except maybe in some rare case where its a special one that is doing some sort of passive listening (like the PC’s)
A funny culprit I found during my own investigation was the GFCI bathroom outlet, which draws an impressive 4W. The status light + whatever the trickle current it uses to do its function thus dwarfs the standby power of any other electronic device.
You can always get a Kill-a-watt (or similar if those aren’t available for the EU) to see how much power something uses in standby
I remember there being special power strips you could get to detect and stop phantom loads like this. But according to that article, there are now regulations to keep this power draw low, so it’s probably not a major problem with modern devices.
i have a couple of those power strips at the office. i'm always forgetting about that 'feature' and end up with stuff 'mysteriously' shutting-off or draining battery instead of charging.
They do consume a tiny little bit. I have a Measurement thingy that yoj plug between your outlet and whatever is plugged in which is accurate to 0.1 W. I tryed 3 chargers, one shows 0.1 W, the other two show 0.0 . I still know they consume a tiny bit, but less than 0.1 W is almost nothing. 0.1 W would come out to a consumtion of 0.876 kWh over a year, wich costs me 0.30 €.
I think its like peppers, they’re all the same specie but we’ve bred strains for different purposes, so you’ve got the whole range from bell peppers, to habaneroa, to shishitos.
It might work, I know there’s types of beer based on wild yeasts, but it probably takes special care and is going to take more effort to get the flavor your want from it.
I just learned about this whole God forsaken idea from this post, and it’s disgusting. However, one thing I know for certain is that the type of people who would buy vaginal yeast brewed beer(typing that almost made me gag) ain’t buying it for how it tastes.
Without any additional research beyond my homebrewing experience, it’s possible but very unlikely - almost everything would be against you. Brewing is a pretty fragile process and whilst homebrewing with wild yeast is possible, its a struggle to keep it alive long enough for it to reproduce to sufficient quantities to do it’s thing. And that’s if it can even get the alcohol content high enough and you don’t get any bacterial or mold contamination.
They can, to an extent, if you had lots time and a staffed lab. Crossbreeding yeast strains is kind of tough as most of the ones used in industrial fermentation (ie the stable, commonly used ones) don’t breed well with others and when they do crossbreed, the resulting new strain is often infertile itself. It’s possible, but difficult, unreliable and the resources required put it well beyond the scope of people who don’t own a brewing company.
Amouranth just apparently dropped $17mil on some fruit farms, so money isn’t a problem for her, but who knows if she would go to the trouble, since it sounds pretty error-prone.
I told myself I wouldn’t do it but I did the research: turns out there’s one company who claims to brew with “donor” yeast and that’s the company she’s talking about partnering with. As far as I can tell from everything I’ve found reporting on them these claims are unverified so everything below should be taken with a large amount of skepticism.
Their websites are pretty sparse with information (and unsurprisingly creepily neckbeardy) but looking at what’s available and been reported I’ve been able to piece together what I think is happening. They talk around it and try to couch it in scientific jargon, it sounds like they’re using it to produce lactic acid only, so no alcohol, which is then sterilised and filtered to death before being used as an additive.
All in all it seems that the steps they describe between “donor” and beer that would result in no actual yeasts from the “donor” in the beer at any point, or even any yeasts cultivated from the originals - Which would seem to be the ultimate intent, probably for food safety law complaince. And this all assumes that they aren’t just lieing about it.
They talk around it and try to couch it in scientific jargon, it sounds like they’re using it to produce lactic acid only, so no alcohol, which is then sterilised and filtered to death before being used as an additive.
Seems like a lot of work to make sour beer, but I have no doubt these will sell out in no time regardless, due to the provenance.
And this all assumes that they aren’t just lieing about it.
And I had to ask, because it sounds a lot like a recipe for snake oil.
Also just to add I did more reading and technically they’re using a Lactobacillus which is a bacteria and not a yeast. Which makes more sense as that’s what’s responsible for yeast infections, just to add to the yuck factor.
Okay, ew… but for what it’s worth brewers yeasts are very specific strains of yeast that have been bred for the purpose. One of the most important aspects of these brewers yeasts versus regular bakers yeasts or wild yeasts (like a sourdough starter) is that they can thrive in higher alcohol environments, allowing them to convert more sugar into alcohol (e.g., I think champagne yeasts can give you a higher ABV). Brewers yeast will also likely be more efficient and convert sugar to alcohol faster than wild strains (sourdough is also a much slower process than using bakers yeasts), which might have implications for food safety if the yeast cannot outcompete other nastier microbes. You can make alcohol with wild yeasts but it’s not as controlled of a process.
One of the most important aspects of these brewers yeasts versus regular bakers yeasts or wild yeasts (like a sourdough starter) is that they can thrive in higher alcohol environments, allowing them to convert more sugar into alcohol…
And it was this aspect that I learned about just a few days prior that led me to question the whole thing. For the purposes of making what average people would consider beer, it seemed like you couldn’t just swap in whatever you wanted.
You definitely can use wild yeasts to make alcohol. It probably won’t work as well or as consistently, but I’m sure you can make some good stuff just by letting things ferment naturally. I bake a lot of sourdough and it’s very fiddly compared to commercial yeasts. You also technically can use bakers yeast for brewing, but I think it’s not ideal for various reasons, like the flavour can be different and I think it doesn’t clump together as much so it’s harder to remove.
The second harmonic from 60hz is 120, which is close to where your hearing it? For what its worth, i get a peak at 100hz, which for the australian grid would make sense?
I checked against a tone generator, and realized that the lower frequency was actually 120, not 60, so I’d guess you’re probably hearing that. That puts the higher frequency at 212-214, which I also checked and that range matches what I’m hearing (for 100hz, it should be at around 177-180).
I mostly use mine for reheating stuff, but cook the occasional two minute noodles or frozen pie. Never had it be disgusting, at worst it can be cold if not done long enough. Cutting the food up and stiring it around halfway through helps.
Yup, also primarily use it for reheating food. Sometimes, when I’m lazy and just want sth to eat, I’ll make myself microwave potatoes. And I also use it to defrost frozen vegetables or fruit sometimes.
However, when I was living in a one bedroom apartment, which didn’t have an oven in the kitchen-corner, I had a microwave with integrated oven and with that I was able to bake myself anything that fits into a pizza sized round baking tray. Still love that thing. It’s a 30 y/o hand me down Siemens from my uncle that still works perfectly. It’s also rather large (about twice the size of a normal microwave) and sadly doesn’t fit into my current kitchen…
Microwaves are fantastic cooking tools, and I’m pretty confident you’re not using yours to its potential. Defrosting, reheating, steaming, boiling. Does it all in half the time with half the mess. All those settings on the keypad do something good. Most people just wack a few numbers in and let the microwave literally cremate the food on full power. Those reheat and defrost settings apply microwave then switch to low or no power, leaving the applied heat to radiate internally before repeating. Different densities and starting temperatures are accounted for.
Obviously you wouldn’t cook a stir fry or a steak in a microwave. Potatoes before roasting though? Dumplings? Frozens? Yes please Mike.
I don’t think I specified, but much like cooking rice on a stove top you won’t run it at the same temperature. The microwave will use less energy than a traditional stove top, not sure about induction ones. And after learning to boil things with it, I do it all the time.
Just get it to boiling then 450 then if needed 300
It does passable baked potatoes too, but if you microwave it for about half the time and then toss it in some oil, kosher salt, and pepper and put it in a hot oven, you get great baked potatoes in far less time than in the oven alone. You’re basically boiling the middle and baking the outside. Great combo.
I like how instead of imagining there might be something you don't know about microwaves, you just kind of assumed everyone bought a dust and popcorn machine for no reason. It's such an "am I so out of touch?" moment.
Yes, microwaves are a poor substitute for an oven but they work fine for vegetables that you might otherwise use a steamer to cook. Stuff like broccoli, beans, carrot pieces etc. Corn on the cob works well too, just give it a few minutes in the microwave with the husk still on.
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