Air
This week there's been a new rash of news reports earlier this week about the air quality and conflicting measurements in Beijing. In case you missed them, you can find one on the websites of the New York Times, McClatchy News Service, or China Dialogue. There was also a story that ran on NPR yesterday morning from Louisa Lim, in which she pulled back the curtain on her life and you get to hear her adorable kids. I must admit I miss Beijing even less, if that is possible, when I read these things.
The largest contributor to any home's excessive electrical consumption is anything with a heating element. Electrical heat sources consume a lot of electricity because they are designed to waste a lot of electricity to produce heat. The small heater I have linked to above is a 750 Watt heater. The larger ceramic heater is a 2000 W model. When I run these overnight and I've already consumed more electricity than all of the air cleaners all day combined. My refrigerator and my hot water heater also eat up a lot more electricity than the purifiers combined. Randy and I have estimated, though, that running all these air filters all of the time adds about 10% to our electrical demand.
In the US, where somewhere around 35% of electricity is consumed by residences, a 10% increase of load by some number of residences would be a huge impact. However, in China, residences only consume somewhere in the neighborhood of 12% of all electricity (most data I could find online is from the mid 2000s like from here and here. From those same links, the sector that consumes the most electricity in China is industry at somewhere around 70%!). Of course, if we are including all kinds of emissions, we'd have to look at cars and trucks, and, in winter especially, central heating in the north.
Am I using all this data to justify our use of air filters in a smoggy, smoggy world? Probably. But the biggest reasons for our having them is that Randy has had asthma since he was a teenager, and both Myles and Brigid have had conditions that may develop into asthma, regardless of where we live.
Another metropolitan region dear to me that also has a terrible reputation for poor air quality is Pittsburgh. No, I don't simply mean the heyday of the steel mills, but rather more recent times. The American Lung Association gives Pittsburgh an F for air quality. For the period between 2007 and 2009, Allegheny County registered 93 "Unhealthy for Sensitive Groups" days and 3 "Unhealthy Days." Ozone levels also factor into the grade, but looking at the AQI data, I am in shock. If Beijing had this kind of air quality, there would not be a first paragraph to this post. In my Beijing-influenced perspective, Pittsburgh has enviable air quality.
I've discussed in this blog our own way to cope with the Beijing air. Last year we purchased a high end European brand air cleaner. Earlier this year we added three more purifiers of another European brand. Randy can feel the difference in his ability to breathe inside the apartment. He increasingly works from home when the air quality creeps up above Unhealthy levels.
Of course, the addition of these plug-in appliances increases our electrical load, thereby increasing the emissions from the coal-burning power plants. This was a point Adam raised on twitter. The large purifier I have linked to above is a 215 Watt machine when run at full power. We actually run it, at the recommendation of the China distributor, at about half power. The other purifiers we have are 80 Watt or less. We do run these 24 hours a day, so the increased power requirements over not having these luxury (but health-saving) items is, worst case, 10.92 kwh/day. This sounds like a huge addition, unless you consider some of the other appliances we run that are somewhere between necessity and luxury.
The largest contributor to any home's excessive electrical consumption is anything with a heating element. Electrical heat sources consume a lot of electricity because they are designed to waste a lot of electricity to produce heat. The small heater I have linked to above is a 750 Watt heater. The larger ceramic heater is a 2000 W model. When I run these overnight and I've already consumed more electricity than all of the air cleaners all day combined. My refrigerator and my hot water heater also eat up a lot more electricity than the purifiers combined. Randy and I have estimated, though, that running all these air filters all of the time adds about 10% to our electrical demand.
In the US, where somewhere around 35% of electricity is consumed by residences, a 10% increase of load by some number of residences would be a huge impact. However, in China, residences only consume somewhere in the neighborhood of 12% of all electricity (most data I could find online is from the mid 2000s like from here and here. From those same links, the sector that consumes the most electricity in China is industry at somewhere around 70%!). Of course, if we are including all kinds of emissions, we'd have to look at cars and trucks, and, in winter especially, central heating in the north.
Am I using all this data to justify our use of air filters in a smoggy, smoggy world? Probably. But the biggest reasons for our having them is that Randy has had asthma since he was a teenager, and both Myles and Brigid have had conditions that may develop into asthma, regardless of where we live.
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