Eddy Current
Senior Member
Is the pilot light in some GFCI receptacles considered phantom voltage?
If you loaded the trunk of your car, the passenger seat, the back seat, the trunk, the glove box, all your pockets and any other place available with salt and took a drive down to the ocean and threw all of it in what would happen to the water?If the GFCI is not being used would it save electricity to push the button and turn off the pilot light or am i crazy? Is it so minute that it wouldn't even make a difference?
130704-1204 EDT
In standby My Sony LCD TV reads 0 W on my Kill-A-Watt EZ. This particular Kill-A-Watt reads 0.3 W with a 40,000 ohm load at 120 V. Calculated power is 0.36 W. Reads 0 W with 80,000 ohm load. Thus, Sony is less than 0.3 W. Yet the Sony can be turned on with the IR remote. Different Kill-A-Watt EZ units have varying capability at these very low power levels.
With good engineering and some cost increment quite low standby power can be achieved. Back in the early 80s IBM added a clock chip made by Motorola to the IBM PC with battery backup. A fairly good size battery with no AC power would last about 3 months. Yet at this time Dallas Semiconductor was making clock chips with an included very small battery that could run for 10 years with no external power. The decision to use the Motorola chip was stupid and caused millions of customers a lot of time and cost relative to battery replacement. The cost benefit was not in the customer's favor.
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130704-1853 EDT
kwired:
The ultimate cost to the customer far outweighed the small manufacturing cost increase.
Rick,Actually the second (analog) reading is a false reading. A basic scientific principle is that your measurement of a system should not alter that system. That is why meters (all of them) have relatively high impedance compared to what they are supposed to measure. The reason why your analog meter does not show this voltage is because it is altering the system it is measuring.
It is not correct to say that an analog meter is showing you a correct reading when it shunts the voltage. You may not like the true reading, and it may confuse you, but it is nevertheless the more correct of the two readings.
Stating that a "phantom" voltage is a "false" voltage is the most egregious of the errors. It is in fact the real voltage.