Energy Efficient Laboratory Equipment Wiki
From Energy Efficient Laboratory Equipment
Contents |
Background and Purpose
| I get really excited about scientists making good choices for appliances and instrumentation. I have no control over plug load. —Campus Energy Manager |
This website is designed to give you purchasing information to use the least energy at your workplace and to stimulate manufacturers to supply efficient equipment.
Many scientists, lab managers, and laboratory design consultants are beginning to use energy efficiency as a selection criterion for lab equipment. Manufacturers are starting to advertise “green features” of their products, but it is often difficult to distinguish “green-washing” from actual energy-saving features. Most manufacturers do not publish more than nameplate voltage/current specifications, which are oftentimes not representative of actual power consumption. With these issues in mind, the Labs21 group seeks to provide a community maintained online database of equipment information through this wiki.
Scientists (in theory) are quantitative and well-informed about resource scarcity and the need for conservation, yet many do not act to save energy, water, plastics or equipment at their workplace. As scientists, we work at the forefront of discovery, public health, or technological breakthrough under stringent accuracy, cost, and time pressures, and we have important role in conservation. Scientists set the standard for accuracy; we also need to set standards for conservation. Laboratories use three to eight times as much energy as a typical office building, so there are many opportunities to conserve.
“Plug load”, or the things we plug into the walls and turn on, use 20-45% of total electricity. Purchase of this equipment is decentralized, and the technicians and graduate students making those purchases don’t have information to help make energy efficient selections. Although your company or university may have green purchasing guidelines, you may not know about them or how to implement them under tight time and performance pressures.
Using this Site
To see equipment energy use simply find the category of equipment you are interested in and browse the product pages. If you are not an editor but want to leave comments, you can participate in the discussion section of each page (look for the discussion button at the top of the page).
Each equipment page is ranked for completeness according to the following scale:
(4) - Information on energy use, efficiency/sustainability features, and user comments
(3) - Information on energy use and limited information in other areas
(2) - No energy use information, but some information on features and comments
(1) - Just feature information
The rank is in parentheses to the right of the title. This rank tells you how extensive the data is. Remember, this is "field data" collected by users who do their best to be consistent, but operating conditions will vary considerably, thus affecting measured energy consumption.
Data Submission and Editing Privileges
To prevent unwanted or inaccurate material from showing up, the contents of this site are moderated by Labs21 group and Allen Doyle, Sustainability Manager at University of California, Davis. The labs21 group maintains the site and controls the creation of new pages. If you are not already an editor and would like to become one, please create an account by logging in and then fill out our contact form.
If you are already an editor on this site and need help starting a new page, see the help section.
All submitters of data are subject to moderator evaluation. Equipment users or testers should use the green test tube icon 
to indicate their submissions, and manufacturers or distributors should be sure to use the red test tube icon.
Comments on Submitted Data
If you want to comment on data submitted for a piece of equipment, please do so at the Category level. Begin your comment with the brand and model # so future readers can trace comments about that equipment. This prevents multiple strands of comments at the lowest page level.
