Saving energy = 12V DC

All new houses in the UK should be built with both a 240V AC standard ring main* and a new 12V DC ring main.

Today our houses are full of transformers that are consuming power all the time and that are there to reduce the voltage to that required for the device. Even lights today come with transformers on them.

Our cars have 12V DC systems in them and we can run iPods, mobile phones, computers, televisions, lights and all sorts of equipment from them.

If we simply added a safety cover to the cigar lighter type of power fitting we see in cars so that they could be installed in houses then we could do away with large numbers of transformers and STOP wasting electricity.
MORE than this - small green power sources like solar cells, garden windmills, downpipe turbines have enormous difficulty generating 240V AC but 12V DC is easy and they can then be small and discrete power generators. They won't have to be large and ugly trying to generate a stupidly high voltage.

The market for local discrete power generating devices that supply a 12V DC system would blossom so we would save power generation at the national grid twice over: 1) We'd stop wasting it through transformers and 2) we'd generate some power for ourselves that was not dependent on the national grid at all.

What it needs is a political encouragement to builders to link them to suppliers and designers of 12V DC systems.


*I do realise that we no longer have 240V AC but rather power on the national grid in the UK is between 220V and 230V AC now but people here still talk about "240V" when talking about our ring main