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Standby Electronics a Waste?

Posted by ScuttleMonkey on from the watts-the-problem dept.

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."

3 of 751 comments (clear)

  1. Consumers want standby? by anagama · · Score: 5, Insightful
    Manufacturers include sleep modes on their products because it is what their customers want, says Matthew Armishaw from the Market Transformation Programme (MTP).

    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 ... but I never wanted it.
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  2. Comment removed by account_deleted · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Comment removed based on user account deletion

  3. A job for the manufacturers by Riquez · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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

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