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Though elevators don't use that much electricity, why not save as much as you can while benefiting your health?
1) How much electricity does a typical high rise apartment dweller use in elevator trips in a month?
Assuming you are traveling 20 floors, making 2 round trips a day you would use 5.8 kWh a month (calculations below). At $.07 a kWh this would be $.40 worth of electricity. To put that in perspective, my refrigerator uses approximately 52 kWh a month and the average home uses 888 kWh a month or 153 times as much. So it is not very much.
2) How much electricity is used per round trip, per floor and per km?
Per round trip (20 floors): 100 Wh. This is about how much a desktop computer and monitor use running for 30 minutes.
Per floor (one direction, 3 meters): 2.5 Wh. That is approximately 1/2 the amount of energy it takes to recharge a cellphone battery.
Per km: 800 Wh. To put this in perspective, the Tesla Roadster electric uses 110 Wh per km. A counter weighted elevator is therefore about 1/7 as efficient as the Tesla Roadster per km. Then again the elevator goes up and down while the Roadster travels on flat land.
3) Does reducing your use of elevator trips make sense?
For health reasons, probably. Walking up a couple of flights of stairs a day is good excerise and your heart will be happy with you. In terms of reducing energy usage for environmental reasons, if you are a heavy elevator or escalator user, this could create real savings.
If you were to walk up and down 3 flights of stairs instead of an elevator, that would save 15 Wh a day or 450 Wh a month. That would be enough to power a 37" Plasma TV for 3 hours.
On the other hand, if living in a high rise in a dense urban environment allows you to save more than 1 gallon of gasoline due to decreased driving, the elevator usage more than pays for itself in energy savings.
reference link:
http://fatknowledge.blogspot.com/2007/02/how-much-energy-does-elevator
The Creative Citizen Network:
alorenk says:
Decreases medical costs to participant and society, decreases/controls diabetes, obesity, and more, can eliminate fees for health club/gym.
posted 12/31/08 at 05:08 AM
Samagon says:
I'll do this on journeys of 5 stories or less going up and 10 stories going down. Otherwise I'll get really dizzy and out of breath.
posted 11/07/08 at 12:47 PM