Well, I've been testing out all sorts of electric and electronic gear to 
find out what actually uses the most power. The results are very 
surprising...

The most thirsty device I've found so far is... the kettle. It uses in 
excess of 3,000 W for the entire duration that you try to boil water 
with it. On the other hand, something like the washing machine uses a 
tiny fraction of that, even when it's on its highest spin cycle. (Uses 
only 600 W. Actually uses 700 W while it spins up, but then drops to 600.)

I haven't tested out the TV yet, but of all the stuff I have tested, it 
seems that any device that performs any kind of *heating* instantly uses 
many times more power than anything else. I emphasize: MANY TIMES more 
power. Not 20% more, not 50% more, but nearer to 1000% more! Heck, even 
the vacuum cleaner (surely a high power device) in fact uses a fraction 
of the power that the toaster does!

Can anybody suggest why this might be? I mean, huge powerful electric 
motors use a fair bit of power, but it's almost insignificant compared 
to heating devices. Why does heating things require so much power?

Also, I notice that my PC uses about 10x as much power as my laptop. 
There are two possible explanations for this:

1. My PC is (or recently was) leading edge, whereas my laptop was pretty 
much old hat even when it was purchased.

2. It's a laptop. It's designed to use less power.

PS. We have *another* Intel Core 2 Duo laptop at work. And just like the 
first one, it seems to be utterly impossible to make it heat up, no 
matter how much number chrunching I throw at it. How do they manage that?

-- 
http://blog.orphi.me.uk/

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