Power Adapters = Wasted Energy!
June 7th, 2008 . by adminYou know those black “brick” power adapters… Our cell phone chargers have them, our computer peripherals have them. Any cordless device we have, that needs recharging, has them.
If you go through your house, it is not uncommon to have 20 of these power adapters plugged in..
All of them down convert 120 volt AC electricity to something like 5 or 10 volt DC electricity.
The problem is that the adapter gives off the wasted energy as heat. (Feel one that is plugged in, you will see how warm it is).
Why don’t they have two wall outlet plugs. One that is normally shaped for 120 volts AC, and then maybe a weird round or square one, that is 12 volts DC ? This way all your automobile accessories at 12 volts would work with it, and all your cordless power drills could recharge on it, etc, etc ? Down converting from 12 volt DC to 9 volt DC wouldn’t use a lot of wasted energy?
Sometimes I think the world is brain dead. Albert Einstein would be laughing at us today, because simple things that could be easily rectified exist with no fix in today’s world.
Why are we so mentally challenged that we cannot address the very problems that plague us?
It seems like a sound idea, but somewhere down the line something would have to convert the 120VAC coming into your home into 12VDC, thus still wasting energy on the conversion. The only way to have non-wasteful DC outlets would be to have power plants dedicated to generating DC current, and the issue with that is DC power suffers from severe voltage drop over a much shorter distance than AC current. That’s one reason we adopted Tesla’s AC over Edison’s DC at the beginning of the 1900s.