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. But in terms of reducing energy usage for environmental reasons, not really. There are many other things that are much easier to do that would have bigger impacts. Changing 3 100 W light bulbs to CFLs would save more electricity than the typical apartment dweller going cold turkey on elevators.
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. It is something, but not much. If you wanted to save energy, you would be better off trying to walk or take public transportation to work.
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.
After all this analysis, I am left with the same thought that I had when I started this, elevators don't use much energy and that Long Emergency guy is seriously bonkers.
Calculations
Data was gathered from the Otis Elevator Energy Use Calculator. They use the following assumptions:
Information gathered from: http://fatknowledge.blogspot.com/2007/02/how-much-energy-does-elevator-use.html
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. But in terms of reducing energy usage for environmental reasons, not really. There are many other things that are much easier to do that would have bigger impacts. Changing 3 100 W light bulbs to CFLs would save more electricity than the typical apartment dweller going cold turkey on elevators.
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. It is something, but not much. If you wanted to save energy, you would be better off trying to walk or take public transportation to work.
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.
After all this analysis, I am left with the same thought that I had when I started this, elevators don't use much energy and that Long Emergency guy is seriously bonkers.
Calculations
Data was gathered from the Otis Elevator Energy Use Calculator. They use the following assumptions:
1) Residential Building:
- Each user performs 2 runs per day (up and down);
- Each run, as a rule, corresponds to half of the elevator's total rise;
- Each floor, as a rule, is 3 m. hig
- In part of the runs, the elevator does not spend energyAs I understand it, each run is an up and down so this means there are 4 single leg journeys a day. I believe this assumes that you are the only person in the elevator each time you take it. This might over estimate the total as sometimes you share a ride. On the other hand, sometimes you are on the ground floor and the elevator has to travel many floors to get to you, so this would under-estimate the total. Hopefully they more or less cancel each other out.
Information gathered from: http://fatknowledge.blogspot.com/2007/02/how-much-energy-does-elevator-use.html
