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Standby Electronics a Waste?
gnunick writes to tell us BBC News is reporting that UK citizens waste quite a bit of electricity each year by leaving electronic gadgets on standby or charging. Critics are arguing that standby mode on electronics are completely unnecessary and should be removed for a number of reasons. From the article: "To put it another way, the entire population of Glasgow could fly to New York and back again and the resulting emissions would still be less than that from devices left in sleep mode."
There are tons of devices on standby right now. They just don't ever bother to tell you, so you THINK it's off.
I remember my first exposure to "standby". An HP laserjet 4L I bought in 1995 -- it didn't have an off button. That bothered me so much I bought one of those undermonitor powerbars with switches on the front so I could turn the darn thing off. Since then, more and more things have come out that can't be shut off and I've sort of accepted "standby" now
What changed under Obama? Nothing Good
Maybe not just oil companies, but they certainly contribute a lot. What i'm talking about is the western public's passive nature toward the coming energy crisis. Oil is running out fast, and everyone knows it. Natural gas is disappearing even faster. But for some reason, people have this "everything's gonna be fine" attitude to the whole situation. Oil companies inflate their expected barrels/year figures to keep stocks high, the government doesn't bother telling people to conserve energy on a large scale... Bad things are going to happen if the west doesn't wake up to this problem.
sudo killall humans
Really, the only way you are going to stop this problem is by switching off everything at the wall.
I suspect actually that what is being angled for here is either UK or European legislation that would prohibit equipment from having a standby button, and mandates hard on/off switches. Personally, I am sufficiently concerned by global warming to support such a move though I'm a a pretty big offender when it comes to leaving the TV on standby.
Maybe smarter electronics would help.
While stuff that needs longer "boots" (like PCs) can take advantages from "stand by" (or sleep) mode, everyday appliances like TVs, VCRs and so on could easily be smarter as far as power consumption is concerned.
Maybe the same could be for power supply units and AC-to-DC units. Once the device is charged a controlled circuit breaker could interrupt any further consumption.
But then how much pollution would be created by all those new things whose lifespan is within a couple of years?
Or maybe smarter people would be a much better solution!
Turn your appliances completely off if you know you won't need them for a while. Unplug your cell phone charger once you used it.
And don't leave anything turned on only because you think you'll save some milliseconds of your time!
Maybe Computers will never be as intelligent as Humans.
For sure they won't ever become so stupid. [VR-1988]
Hello? Ever heard of thermodynamics?
So where exactly does that power go? In the form of flying angels that flap around the room maybe?
Baker's Law: Misery no longer loves company. Nowadays it insists on it
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Transformers are equally culpable of silently sipping power.
I've read that 10% of a households energy use is from transformers.
That they use power is obvious if you look at the electrical diagram -- the things have a loop through which current travels. There is some waste power that gets lost.
Do we all go around the house unplugging our transformers, to stop from using power? I doubt it.
I figure that my electronic devices, with their "waste heat" are actually heating my place. I don't see that as a bad thing -- I want the heat.
If, on the other hand, I had to run AC to cool down the building, then I'd be peeved at them sucking up power.
http://www.thebricktestament.com/the_law/when_to_
The real problem with this reasoning is that the generator of the original electricity was possibly going around drive by a turbine that was driven by heat. The efficiency of that transfer is far below 50 %. Only if your house is electrically heated, without employing a phase-change heat exchange (a reversed fridge for the air leaving the building, making the outside a little cooler) it's equivalent and one can still argue about how to achieve optimum airflow.
Of course, standby power in electrically heated buildings is less of a problem than in electrically cooled ones. In that case you have waste power for standby and waste heat from standby that must be handled by the AC, causing even more waste.
It would be trivial to have a (rechargeable) backup battery in the device that powers the, well, powerswitch. You could even use a normally-closed relay, so that when the battery powers down, the device powers up, stealthily enters sleep mode just to recharge the battery, and the shuts down; though that would cost more energy and doesn't make much sense (why have a sleep mode at all on devices that are switched off for months at end?). Mobile phones don't power down by being unplugged and they do fine springing to life at the touch of a button.
The main reason sleep mode sucks though is that by its increasing ubiquitousness, it's pushing away good old circuit breakers to where you can't find them. Plenty of PC cases only have the soft-off button connected to the BIOS, and the only way to break the circuit is to remove the powerplug from the socket (which incidentally is just great for repair and maintenance, since now you've also removed the ground circuit). Many TVs have thoroughly hidden actual-off switches. And sometimes, when you switch something OFF you just want it to switch OFF. *sigh*
SCO employee? Check out the bounty
I want devices that can be controlled at a distance and that don't require me always around to control the damn thing.
Ah yes, I can see how that would be useful for televisions. Ahem.
Talk about the eco-nuts missing the point, its not about making this a harsher world. I suspect the eco-nuts believe that the world is going to get really very harsh quite quickly if people aren't willing to take remedial steps such as... oh I don't know - standing up to turn on the TV.
its.... about people being smarter.
Yes, yes it is.
Everything (and I mean everything) for which I own a remote control for does not have any way to turn off "properly" short of unplugging it from the wall. VCRs, Cable Boxes, Televisions, Radios, they all are either powered on, on stand-by, or are unplugged.
VCRs make sense. I don't necessarily need the visible clock display, but I do rely on the timer to kick the machine on and record my shows.
Televisions? What a waste. Sync up to the cable system's time when I power it on.
Cable Boxes? Please. Those things use almost as much power on as off, and I can't think of any benefit to me. Store the menu data for the next few days in flash and sync up when I power it on.
Radios? Well, in my house those are typically clocks that happen to play music, so the clock benefits me, no problem there.
Hell, even my car goes into stand-by mode to run the alarm, and to allow me to operate the locks.
I didn't choose these products this way. It's more or less the only way they come.
I plugged all of my equipment into a powerstrip with a real switch on it. Switch it off and everything is definitely off; it wasn't rocket science.
John.
You might save time, of course, there is no denial of that. Saving energy by the process is a kind of weird question. Will your saved time result in the machine staying in sleep mode for one minute longer, or will you do actual work for one more minute? The shift in power usage for an idle and active desktop system is not that significant, at least not when the shift won't involve heavy duty for the GPU in either case.
On the other hand, the sleep mode will also induce almost all of the material fatigue in different components that turning off would give. The HD will stop and so on.
Long live Suspend-to-disk, no matter what OS it is. Yes, it will take longer to resume than suspend-to-RAM, but it's still often quicker than a clean boot, and certainly quicker than a clean boot + resuming work where it was.
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It's really a job for the manufacturers of TV's to come up with a decent power saving system. People are going to be as lazy as you let them be.
Also there's an issue which no-one seems to have noticed - perhaps not with all TV's, but at least on the two that I own.
If I turn them off on the set, they lose the settings. I have to reset the time & any preferences etc.
I do agree that wasting all that power is plain crazy, so why can't the manufacturers just have an on/off on the remote & off means a *tiny* amount of power is flowing just to keep the IR active. All prefs should be saved onto solid state memory that does not require power - regardless of how cheap the TV is, surely all manufacturers can manage that without a cost implication.
I guess Standby is a leftover from old TV's that took time to warm up - that's pretty much gone now & I imagine non existant with flat screen TV's
Seems bizarre really, 2006 & we havent thought of a way to turn a TV off
* Game Over * High Score: 264,846,927 -- Your Score: 14
There are tons of devices on standby right now. They just don't ever bother to tell you, so you THINK it's off.
Well, it's pretty hard to fail to notice that my USB mouse receives power even with the computer being off. I mean, it's not just a LED, it's nearly bright enough to read by.
This is the second mouse I have that emits so much light -- and we're not speaking about special fancy geek-style mice. They were just the "tell the tech guy at work: 'do we have a mouse I can buy? I'm too damn lazy to go to a shop'" kind.
If your random mouse draws that much power, I guess that the article has a good point.
The creatures outside looked from Alt-Right to Antifa; but already it was impossible to say which was which.
No. The tubes were in a sort of stanby mode. The filiments were running at about 1/3 power so they warm up fast. The high voltage was off completely. I would bet they took less than 1/3 the ON power in the "stanby" mode.
Even if the filiments were in full on; they would still only be a fraction of the overall power of the TV. The resistors dissipated a lot of power. The circuit design back then was a "wast power to reduce voltage" type of design. Now days all circuits are designed to switch power to reduce voltage. Much more efficent.
With todays low power silicon there is no reason to waste power. If it takes more than 1watt to run a switch then it's too much. Maybe 3watt if you want a "remote control on" feature.
Nothing like a good "CLICK!" to let you know it went off!
I don't want a pickle; I just want a Motor-Cycle! A four foot cop arrived with a five foot gun!
I live in Europe and ever since the 90s or maybe before, we've had standby o_0 you think TV makers have to use different standards for America/Europe *has a coughing fit when someone points out NTSC/PAL and power supply differences*
which is totally what she said
From the article: "To put it another way, the entire population of Glasgow could fly to New York and back again and the resulting emissions would still be less than that from devices left in sleep mode."
It's not the entire population of Glasgow flying to New York that worries me. It's the prospect of them coming back again.
Wasting electricity is an expensive pastime, no doubt. But worrying about standby mode is a gnat-bite compared to our hopeless dependence on the motor car and in the UK's case our increasing dependence on importing energy from rather unstable parts of the world. This sounds rather like a typical UK New Labour gambit: encouraging people to feel good citizens while dodging the all the tough questions.
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I did the measurements once. My iMac G5 20" @ 1.8 GHz consumed 3.4 W at standby. Running, it consumed 75-100W, depending on things like processor use and screen backlight brightness. All these were before I upgraded memory from 650MB to 2GB, though.
AOL
To turn off my TV installation would mean separately switching off the television itself, the video recorder, the DVD player and the digital TV decoder. Neither the video recorder nor the digibox start cleanly - the video recorder wants it's time set (surely that could be stored in non-volatile) and the digibox gets petulant about the EuroSport card being reinserted. And consequently I don't do it - although in an average week I watch less than one hour's television. If my next TV integrates at least the digital receiver and a DVD-RW drive, and starts cleanly with no faff I'd be more than happy to do without a standby mode.
Same applies to everything else in the house, actually. Don't need standby; do need reasonably fast, reliable startup.
I'm old enough to remember when discussions on Slashdot were well informed.
Nobody seems to have mentioned yet that power switches have moving parts, and moving parts are always the first thing to break. (Yes I am aware that 'standby' usually involves a relay which contains a moving part, but relays don't involve the 'human factor')
My parents routinely turn things off instead of using standby and get through a TV rougly every 4 years. Cause of failure? The power switch! Kettle? Hoover? Stereo? All die within a few years because of a dead power switch! In contrast I moved out of the house some 10 or so years ago and have yet to have anything die. Go figure.
Sure, not using standby may save a few watts per year but what about the extra waste generated by dead electronics
Anyone with any sense with a career in environmental protection tries to make people take one less flight per year (all the cars in uk produce 1 tenth the emissions all the airflights in the UK produce! They persuade people that if they recycle anything, to recycle their aluminium because the carbon savings from, eg glass, are neglible if not negative, but the savings from aluminium are immense. They persuade people to buy electricity from companies that at least pretend to care about emissions. They persuade people to buy food that doesn't have to be flown from New Zealand to get to their plates.
They do not have a go at people about leaving devices on standby.
Standby is there to make life a little easier, and almost all devices make standby easy, and full-power-off harder. Standby wastes relatively, bugger-all electricity. So put things in perspective and don't make people feel guilty about trivial shit, because they will assume that saving the environment is all as tedious and unpleasant, and choose to not do anything at all.
I see this being a problem as a lot of people would then leave their devices (DVD ect, not so much the tv) on all the time. It makes no difference to them if it is on or off (just some extra lights on the front) but they still have the convenience of standby.
Make a maximum wattage during standby and get rid of the standby LEDs! They are pretty much useless most of the time anyway.
When I suggested he insulate the house to save money and energy, he said "No no, it is much to hot in summer here!"
I live in Australia and it amazes me what primitive building codes they have. Most homes are timber-framed "brick veneer" and their thermal performance is abysmal. I think new regulations now force walls and roofspace to be insulated but it seems to have been a long time coming. My house was built in 1982 and it totally sucks - absolutely nothing in the walls and a limited layer of loose fill in the roof. Whenever I have done any interior work that involves exposing the frame I have insulated that bit, but it's very patchy. The roof space can be dealt with, but most of the problem is the walls and windows.
In addition, many homes are built individually to the owner's specification, and very few seem to have a clue about using the natural direction of the sun to create sensible areas of light and shade, areas that are warm in winter and cool in summer. Luckily in that respect my own house is situated correctly - in fact 180 to the orientation shown on the original plans! Obviously someone realised just before it was erected that the original orientation was stupid. Or maybe they just misread them...
The other thing that amazes me is that more homes are not built with built-in solar water heating and other solar-powered ventilation arrangements. These require no moving parts or external power, are very simple and effective. There ARE some houses that have these features and their benefits are obvious as soon as you walk into one - nice and cool in summer, and the sunnier it is, the cooler they get! Hot water for free. Instead most people fit reverse-cycle aircon to their homes to make them bearable when all it would take is some better building codes. It's about time this was forced on builders by legislation, but there appears to be no sign of it. Even the UK is forcing new homes to be built with solar water heating for god's sake!! I think outsiders think of Austrlians as being quite 'green conscious' and in some respects they are, but talk about missing the wood for the trees!
What I'd love to make a comeback - and what is part of the problem here - is a simple "off" switch that actually means off.
The problem isn't that electronics are not smart enough. The problem is that electronics manufacturers aren't. As customer, I would like to have one very simple thing: A button that when I use it actually means "off" as in "absolutely no more electric power going into this device".
Assorted stuff I do sometimes: Lemuria.org
That would be extremely inconvenient.
Why? I turn my TV off at the button on the set every night. Doing so adds maybe an extra 5 seconds to the warm up time the next day when I switch it on, but so what? Same for my monitor - if I'm going to be away from the PC for more than a few minutes, off it goes.
I really don't see how it's an inconvenience.
It's official. Most of you are morons.
I was flicking through the manual of my Sony LCD monitor today, and it (a 17" 1280x1024) draws 45W in use, 3W in standby, and 1W in 'off'. Go figure. "Welcome to the new world of 'on/off'."
I agree. When investigating my large eletricity usage it came to my attetion that the freezer was running overtime. The freezer was old and its CFCs had leaked to the atmosphere which kept the compressor running 24/7.
I think issues like this are far more relevant than "Should I keep my DVD player on standby?".
electrical equipment in sleep mode used roughly 7TWh of energy and emitted around 800,000 tonnes of carbon
He has calculated that the CO2 emissions from electrical equipment being left on standby are equivalent to 1.4 million long-haul flights.
Per second? Day? Month? Year? The units are never fully specified, except once in the title of the graph.
It's just lazy to write articles like this. The figures are all there for "shock value", but they are meaningless.
Additionally, there is no mention of the fact that energy "wasted" by a standby device is just heat, and thus offsets the energy that you would otherwise "waste" in your gas boiler or electric heater.
BBC News, go to the bottom of the class.
You're an immobile computer, remember?
Whats wrong with downsized bikini's?
Hmmm?
I for one welcome our Downsized bikini wearing overlordets
Help! help!, the termites are eating my DRAM!!!
"Standby Electronics a Waste?"
Shouldn't that be an exclamation mark at the end instead of a question mark?
naah sig schmig
Who cares? The CRT in my TV is turned off (to the point that it takes about 10 seconds to fully come back on), so the component that takes 99.9% of the power isn't drawing a thing. The only thing required for standby is the IR receiver circuit. How much current can that possibly draw (at low voltages to boot) when idle?
Dewey, what part of this looks like authorities should be involved?
after a powerbill I decided to add a switch that would cut the power to my projector, VCR, DVD, Radio etc..
I actually bought one of those power outlet meters to try to reduce my home energy usage.
But after I tested two or three appliances, I realized that this whole endeavor is completely nonsense except in summertime. If my computer, power amp, water heater, or even incandescent lights, are running during the winter... every watt of power they generate will reduce my heating bill by almost exactly that watt.
Now yes, I do have electric heating. The tradeoff may differ for those who don't. But the fact remains that powering devices in the home is much less wasteful than it seems, for those who live in colder climates. Since this study was done in Britain, I wonder if they controlled for this factor.
In the summer, of course, I try to keep things off as much as possible. But this is primarily because it's too hot, and only secondarily to save power.
--
Dum de dum.
Freedom is not the license to do what we like, it is the power to do what we ought.
His point, if you care to think for a moment is that a few hundred thousand refigerator upgrades would save much more power than all those standby-mode devices use.
Really folks, this gadget-centric perspective is pretty ridiculous. If you want to save power, look at the bigger appliances and the heating and cooling efficiencies of your house. That's where the savings are to be had, not in obsessing about your roomba.
(Though as an aside I must say it would be real nice if the Linux Kernel folks would deal with making scsi spindown work as well as ide (or at all, even.) That would save me personally quite a few watts.)
Someone had to do it.
Which is absorbed by the walls or other objects in the room and released as heat! :-)
Interesting post, but mostly wrong.
While the energy going into a transformer increases with the energy taken from the output, small 50/60 Hz transformers are usually far less efficient than large ones and can't be treated as being ideal. Most of these small transformers will waste several Watts or more even with no load.
Losses in transformers fall into two major categories, copper losses which increase with load and magnetic (core and leakage) losses which are closer to constant. Small transformers, such as those found in AC adaptors, have relatively high core losses. Using too little core area makes it easier to saturate the core. Using too few of turns on the primary (to save copper and space) results in the primary inductance being low, making the current and flux density fairly high with no load. That higher current flowing through fairly thin (high resistance)wire also results in no-load copper losses being higher than they could be. With many of those small transformers the energy consumed under no-load conditions is nearly as much as it is under full load conditions. These losses are what make most a.c. adaptors warm to the touch even when they're not connected to any load.
You have your monitor coils mixed up. The deflection coils on c.r.t.s are unrelated to any startup surge. There frequently is another coil that actually has nothing to do with normal monitor operation that does operate at a significant current for a short time, but that doesn't amount to much energy because it is brief. I'm talking about the degaussing coil. Typically it is energized briefly when a monitor or television is turned on cold. The combined effect of heating in a thermistor and use of a voltage-dependent resistor is to run a decaying alternating current through the coil for about 10 seconds. The decaying alternating magnetic field demagnetizes the aperture mask inside the c.r.t. and nearby mounting hardware. It's not unusual to hear a bit of a thud/buzz from the monitor at turn-on due to the field from that coil. If you notice a slight shaking of the image just as the c.r.t first reaches operating temperature, you're seeing the end of the degaussing process. The metal aperture mask just behind the screen inside the c.r.t. has the holes or slots needed to properly restrict the beams from the Red, Green, and Blue electron guns so that each only strikes the phosphor coating for the correct color. A magnetized mask typically causes blotches of switched colors, most often near the edges of the screen. Some monitors have a push button for manual degaussing instead (watch the wild colors and image shaking). That saves a little energy under operating conditions since there is no voltage dropped across a thermistor.
By having the thermistor in series with the main power to a monitor, it can serve the dual function of powering the degaussing coil and reducing the amplitude (but extending in duration) of the startup surge current flowing into the capacitors. That reduces the surge current extending the life of the power switch, and allows use of a smaller fuse which would give better protection against fault conditions. Turning a monitor off and on quickly won't degauss the c.r.t. again because the thermistor takes time to cool off. It has nothing do do with energy storage in coils. From an energy consumption standpoint, the startup surge and energy stored in the capacitors is unimportant. The only time it really matters is when a monitor is running from a U.P.S. If the startup surge is too high, a U.P.S. may shut down when the monitor is turned on. The same U.P.S. might run fine if it kicks in feeding a monitor that is already running.
When you fire up a monitor and most other electronics the surge is primarily from the initial charging of the filter capacitors in the power supply (in the case of a switcher, the first set after the rectifier). Like light bulbs with filaments, there is a bit of a surge when first applying power to the c.r.t. filament. That's because tungsten has a positive temperature coefficient. Resistance is lower when cold. Many monitors have a small series resistor in the filament wiring to reduce the surge current. That reduces demand and the power supply and lessens the stress to the filament.