Slashdot Mirror
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."
These numbers are not new, and this story is 5 years late. See: http://www.berkeley.edu/news/media/releases/2001/
They will keep talking about energy wastage and no amount of energy awareness if going to change that. Unless of course, you have to refill your electricy "tank" for $5.00 a gallon, and then everyone will buy the consumer electronics equivalent of a Prius or Insight.
The problem is that standby is very convenient. I don't want to have to walk upto my TV to turn it on. I want to sit down and press the power button on the remote. For me to be able to do this the TV has to be using a bit of power (how much I am not sure of).
Some devices, like my DVD player and amplifier, have no way turning them fully off. The power button on the unit simply takes them out of standby or puts them back into standby. It is not a hard power switch like devices of old. Even PCs these days (with ATX power supplies) can be considered to be on standby since there will be a little bit of power consumed.
Really, the only way you are going to stop this problem is by switching off everything at the wall. The power point for my hifi setup is behind a shelf and there is no way to easily reach it so that option is out. The only other thing that comes to mind is for manufacturers putting the older style power switches on equiptment, but I can't see that happening in a hurry.
(\(\
(^.^)
(")")
*This is the cute bunny virus, please copy this into your sig so it can spread
It's amazing the extent to which we either forget about or just don't care about turning stuff off these days. Ever passed through the business district of your town/city late at night well after working hours? Noticed all those office buildings with all their lights blazing out? How about that computer in your office? Can you put your hand on your heart and say you always turn it off before you leave work at the end of the day? Not only would it help the environment and reduce waste of finite resources, but it would probably save businesses a fair bit off their power bills too.
Back in the vacuum tube days, when you turned on your TV it would take a few minutes for the tubes to warm up before you could use it. Then "instant on" was invented. Basically the tubes were left at full power 24/7, so the TV was drawing almost as much power "off" as on, with few people realzing it, and tubes took a lot of power.
Maybe the Europen TVs today are a hold-over from that.
I always wonder whether it's smarter to turn my iMac(last PPC with 2GHz) rather completely off over night (~10 hours) or leave it in sleep mode. Considering the start up time and starting all the usual apps plus loading the documents I've been using the day before. I tend to think this is a waste of time and probably consumes as much energy as leaving it on sleep mode. Any suggestions on whether I'm right or wrong?
I find it strange the way people use electricity like it doesn't cost anything. I suspect it is because the link between using it and paying for it is weak in that you might pay for it upto a month after you use it. I firmly believe that _all_ electricity meters should have a display showing how much it is _actually_ costing you in some prominant place. How many people could honestly be bothered to climb into the broom cupboard to take a reading and then convert that reading from units in to £/$//etc using some tricky to understand pricing structure that changes with frightning regularity. It's just not going to happen so people will just keep paying whatever their bill shows and not understand how much different things cost to run.
I used to have a better sig but it broke.
What they don't mention is why it's so high. I remember when we first got a TV with a standby mode. According to the specs, the draw in standby mode was absolutely miniscule (less than 1W). It did exactly what it said on the tin. Yet when I just checked the specs on my monitors, one is 3-10W in standby mode, and the other doesn't even bother listing power consumption in standby mode. I don't get it. What on earth could they be doing that needs to draw that much power? I don't agree with banning standby mode, but I do think it should be quite feasible to get devices down to using less than 1W while in that mode.
"The invisible and the non-existent look very much alike." -- Delos B. McKown
I live off-grid, charging a battery bank via solar and wind power, and as a result I've learned not to waste any electricity at all...I simply cannot afford to.
;)
My friends are aghast at "the way I live", wondering how I survive without microwaving everything, or without an electric dishwaser and clothes-dryer. To them I may as well be eating raw meat in a cave someplace.
At least I have enough amps to run my 533 MHz VIA mini-ITX system and read Slashdot...
For us that live in coldish countries, and I'd place Scotland in this group, as long as you have regulated heating, heat from PSUs is just as good as any other heat.
No, not quite as easy unfortunately. I'm renovating a summer house, and though hardly an expert, I've learned that where you place the heat sources matter a lot. You want your radiators below the windows for instance, because that is where the cold "fall" in to the room. If you put the heating somewhere else (a PSU in the computer of your desk for instance), you risk getting cold air currents along the floor and walls, and the nice heating going up to the ceiling and being wasted. Humans react to temperature changes, many will feel chilled if they get these cold draughts along the floor and walls.
Offtopic - What amazes me as a Swede is that all Anglo-saxon countries I've been to build so incredibly flimsy and energy-inefficient houses. England, Australia, and from what I've heard, the US as well. I mean, you are rich countries, why build like third world?
When I lived in Australia, my host had an aircon constantly blasting heat in winter and cold in summer. Since there were big gaps under the doors and around the windows, and very little insulation in the ceiling this desired temperature quickly escaped. In winter he closed much of the house except one room where the air con was, and we had to stay there wrapped in blankets. 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 tried to explain that insulating a house is like a thermos. It can keep your chocolate warm in winter, or your chilled drinks cold in summer. He remained sceptical.
Being bitter is drinking poison and hoping someone else will die
you are forgetting, SUVs waste more resources then 100 commercial airplanes!
I have a CRT television set (with a standby button), a VHS recorder (with a standby button), a DVD player (with a standby button), and a digital satellite set-top box (with a standby button). Only one has a real mechanical, circuit-breaking, power switch easily available (the TV).
In order to even turn all the devices into standby, I need to fumble for four different remote controls, else they all end up heating the living room when nobody is in there. Typically, the TV is the only thing that gets put into standby.
Given that the VHS has auto-set up and can recover from a power outage (save for timer recording, which many people don't use), I guess it might make some sense to hook them up to one of those master-slave power bars, whereby you set it up so that when the TV stops drawing full current, the other sockets are switched OFF.
The digital satellite set-top box has a few issues with losing power (it loses EPG reminders, and defaults to some silly promotional channel, which I guess is mostly due to design by BSkyB).
Here's another thought. Duplicate circuitry. All of those devices have DC transformers. The digital satellite set-top box has MPEG2 decoders, as does the DVD player, yet they are never used at the same time, but the circuitry is probably receiving their full power budget at all times. Likewise, the TV set and DVD player both have audio amplifiers, yet I've never used the speaker outputs on the DVD player.
If I had one well-designed appliance that had the screen, a DVD transport, a VHS transport (yes, they are still used), and an integral digital satellite decoder, it could use far less power overall. The problem there is obsolecence. In order to get that, I need to either sell, give away, or recycle the existing equipment, which uses energy. It also means that if I decide that High Definition television is going to be good, I'd have to discard the lot of it and replace it, but with something with a HD-DVD, or blue ray mechanism? turns into diminishing returns.
If all such equipment responded to a standard "enter standby" remote control code, then I bet more equipment would be going into standby rather than remaining on full-power. If they could all go into a mode where they use less than a watt in standby, all the better.
Well, kind of. But you're not really doing your bit for the national Kyoto commitment that way. Consider: if you heat your home by burning gas, you're getting pretty much 100% efficiency. All the energy turns to heat. If, OTOH, you heat your home by electricity, somewhere there's a powerplant burning gas at much less than 100% efficiency to provide that power. Much better to cut out the middleman, and usually it's a good deal cheaper too.
If there's a device you really have to have on, then its waste heat is a bonus in your cold house, that's fine. But in general, it's better to switch off any superfluous electrical devices and let the thermostat burn a little more gas to make up the difference.
Real Daleks don't climb stairs - they level the building.
No, he is right. I recently moved do London from central europe, and it realy amazes me, how poorly built houses are here. No one would buy such bad house in country where I come from. Even people who build their house by themselves make much better work, then 'proffesionals' in UK. Only here you can find such little paradoxes like heating in the hall, but NOT in living rooms.
On everything I've own over the last twenty years the button actually turns the device off. The remote puts it in to standby.
Completely off topic. Why have an eject button on a DVD remote? You still have to physically remove the disk!
I'm currently having to stick some £15 a week into it (Winter and the heating is on) so I know if things can be reduced by turning them really off.
ps, I get 30 minutes grace with the server as it's the only thing on the UPS... so I have enough time to get the emergency credit activated which gives me a couple of days to get credit put on the payment card.
Donald 'Duck' Dunn: We had a band powerful enough to turn goat piss into gasoline.
Anything which doesn't have a conveniently located power button needs stand-by.
At home, I have my entire computer setup (box, monitor, printer, scanner, etc.) plugged into a single power-line with a big switch mounted to the desk; one switch to rule them all. If only I wouldn't need to manually shut-down WinXP, it'd be perfect.
The main idea was to rid of the annoying stand-by LEDs when I didn't need them, but the power saving is nice too.
Slashdot social media options: AIM, ICQ, Yahoo, Jabber and Mobile Text. Why no MySpace?
The UK has a lot of old houses (Victorian/Edwardian) and there is a snobbery against new houses and an obsession with 'period' features of old houses like fireplaces and sash windows. I don't get it, personally, but I think it is at least partly due to the crap 'new' housing built during the 1960's.
I was once trying to tell an American friend of mine that a TV will consume a huge amount power while it's on standby in it's lifetime. They asked me how they could tell if they're TV is in standby and I said that the red LED is on, but the TV didn't have one. So then I said that Standby is when the TV's on but not switched off, but this person's TV set didnt have a power switch. So then I said it's when a TV appears to be off, but when you press the on button on the remote, it will magically come back to life!
When people are given the choices of pressing a button on the remote control, and physically unplugging the TV set most of the time they'll go for the remote, press the "Power" button and then the TV will look dead. With my TV, I find that with the glow of the unusually big LED and the buzzing noise it makes on standby, it's more of a comfort switching the damn thing off!
Go home and shave your giant head of smell with your bad self
As a Norwegian living in England, I have to agree... Here in the UK I think it's largely down to mild winters. Insulation is practically non-existent in older buildings here (most new builds seems to be better, thankfully) - just a thin wooden floor with huge cracks and 20 cm or so of air separating you from the ground is quite common. And hollow wooden floors with cracks, only sealed with plaster plates for the ceiling in the floor below is pretty normal within residential houses.
Before I'd moved to the UK I hadn't even seen buildings built like that except in museums.
The lofts are usually equally bad - huge parts of the building mass still have completely uninsulated lofts (though admittedly there is a push to change that, with government grants often available to offset the cost of insulation) and huge cracks everywhere.
But my pet peeve is the British builders approach to leaks. Just fill the cracks with some silicone or other filler, and paint over whatever stains there are, wait until the next crack develops and try again, instead of ensuring bathroom floors are properly sealed.
I guess it's a cost thing combined with the fact that the climate lets them get away with it (for those who haven't lived anywhere COLD: Imagine having your walls full of moisture. Then imagine that water freezing and expanding. Now imagine the cracks developing after a few years of that happening on a regular basis...). But it annoys the hell out of me when I see bathrooms built in a way that'll give the people on the floor below a nice shower if you get the floor a little bit wet.
British builders, though, seems to be in a league of their own, and that is not a compliment. I've never ever had to deal with such a bunch of incompetent twits. Just got to love how they think that it's perfectly fine to just keep pumping more silicone into a flat roof if it's leaking, instead of actually trying to find a fix the massive leaks in the top coating of the roof. Because apparently that's too much work for them.
The lack of a proper certification system and a proper education is really a problem - to the point where it's not uncommon for people here to hire in German builders to get things done properly even with the extra costs (for larger jobs they'll easily pay for themselves by actually doing things properly, and without the massive delays British builders seems to take great pride in...).
Just a timely experience for this article: Last week I bought a DVB-T receiver. I noticed it is still very hot when put on standby, so I measured it, with the funny result of having the same identical consumption in power on state as in standby: 16W. That's price for total digitalisation: the CPU must be on to process a command or timer.
Solution? I sacrificed factory guarantee and I am currently in process of device modification. However, I mourn the electronics consumer droids without knowledge of circuitry and without soldering skills, not to mention I will never buy any AverMedia product in the future.
There you are, staring at me again.
I can't speak for England and Australia, but here in the US there's a built-in bias toward a box made of bricks and sticks with a tar paper roof. Insulation is much better than it used to be and frequently dictated by local building codes, but modern homes are still surprisingly inefficient.
Several factors contribute to that here in the US. First if you want to build something like a concrete house, you'll have to have extremely good credit or be prepared to finance it yourself. If there are no "comps" comparable home sales for comparison, then Fannie Mae won't package the loan and the bank or mortgage lender won't be able to sell the paper on the mortgage. That means a portfolio loan and those require much different relationship with the lending institution. A situation that also makes your high thermal mass home difficult to sell if you have to move.
Building codes, home owners associations and buyer perception all feed into a system that's designed around construction that is shabby and inefficient. I have a steel house that is extremely tight and well insulated. My utility bills are about a 1/3 of the family that lives next door. But put our houses on the market and theirs would sell faster than ours because anyone could get a loan for their home, but not ours. Go figure.
That's our life, the big wheel of shit. - The Fat Man, Blue Tango Salvage
So a transformer is not 100% efficient {although it's about the closest anyone's ever built}.
The problem is, most "wall warts" are not just simple transformers. Most devices that use wall warts use DC, therefore, there has to be rectification of the AC current in there to make the devices work. On a wall wart, that is typically done through some form of diode bridge with a capacitor in there to level off the power.
Most wall warts are incredibly inefficient (Popular Electronics once did an article on this subject some years ago, and found that they were somewhere in the 50-70% range), and they are consuming power even when the device they power is off or even disconnected. The diode bridge/capacitor combination creates a lot of inefficiency.
I built a complete 12VDC plant in my house, with special 12V outlets in every room and a central switching power supply. I was able to save about 10% on my power bill just from doing the simple act of eliminating all the wall transformers around my house. For devices that need 5V or some other arbitrary low voltage: semiconductor DC-to-DC power converters work quite well (like devices based around the 7805), and are nearly 100% efficient.
My power supplier lends compact power usage meters for about one week (about like this (yes, they seem to have recycled the pun in the dept.-name))
Anyway, more or less coincidentally (/. has got these stories quite often, and I planned on posting about it as soon as I find the right occasion), I have got one pretty much right now. The claims you promote there, about the people with a career in environmental protection, not promoting anti-standby-mode but rather true power-off, seem false just by the existence of this article (and countless others).
So, a few bits of recorded data:
PC PSU ATX "standby": ~2W, an other model: ~7W, an external notebook PSU: ~3W
N64: ~2W (the switch is connected behind the PSU)
TV: ~2W (a very small one)
VGA CRT device: ~8W (it's got a pretty stupid switch that is more common with LCD devices)
Now, the more interesting stuff, but slightly off-topic:
PC, operational, max.: ~97W (~1.2 GHz Duron, Radeon 7200 Series) :) (opera))
PC, operational, max.: ~60W (~466 MHz Celeron, GeForce 2 MX 100/200)
Notebook, operational, w/ display on: ~16W (133 MHz, under "perl -e 'while(1) { }'" ~23W (same method for most other "under loads"), which I am also currently using
CRTs: ~55W (~17", textmode), ~45W (small TV w/ sound), ~70W (~15", older, in text-mode ~60W)
Radio alarm clock, w/ 7-segment LED displays: ~2W (sound makes not really a difference (yes, it does sound horrible))
And yes, I'm quite sure I forgot some interesting things. Also, most PCs draw much more power, because they might use a Pentium 4 CPU, more advanced graphics cards, more fans (the environment of the ~466 MHz device is ~10 degrees Celsius in winter, so the CPU-fan is deactivated by hardware (anyone got thoughts about removing the PSU fan?), and yes, the harddisk is quite "unhappy").
The device also correctly said ~40W for a 40W incandescent bulb (blecch), and I wouldn't know how to design such a device to not be able to cope with quickly changing power needs (quite old models they give out).
One more rumor I've got to eliminate: CRTs don't draw that much power while going on, only for very few seconds quite much (~225W the highest reading, and it can't be more than ~1800W), thereafter the information above applies.
I'm going to disagree with you, just as a personal opinion.
I prefer the light from the modern compact fluorescents to incandescents -- I find that rooms just seem a lot "sunnier" when lit with the higher-color-temperature lamps. I'm not talking about the old greenish/blue-white ones, they're pretty disgusting, but the last few "warm fluorescent" ones I picked up at Home Depot are a lot nicer than the incandescent lights I replaced. I think they're around 4000-5000K, and going back to 2800K (typical incandescents) isn't even an option. They just seem too yellow now.
Granted, I don't have much in the way of direct lighting -- I have mostly torchiers and 3-lamp 'pole lights' aimed up at the walls and/or cieling, so perhaps if you had nothing but direct light it wouldn't work as well. I also can't stand being in a dimly lit room; I have what would be the incandescent equivalent of 750W of lighting in about 250 square feet. If it was actually all incandescent, not only would I be broke from the power bill, but the room would probably be uncomfortably warm. (And possibly it would be a fire hazard as well.)
But since installing the CFL bulbs I've noticed I'm just a lot less tired, and less dependent on the weather outside -- it used to be that if it was a really dark, overcast day outside that the room would be noticably more dim; with more lighting I can just close the blinds and have basically the same illumination available as if it was a sunny day outside.
I also wouldn't want a TV that required a manual power switch on the front to turn it on and off. I have several TVs in odd positions (on top of book cases, etc.) throughout my house, and they would be a lot more of a pain to use if I had to touch them in order to start using them. If they didn't have standby, I'd probably just switch them to the DVD player's "screen saver" when I wasn't using them instead of turning them off.
Anyway, I'm not arguing with you, just offering a contrary opinion. To each his own, I suppose.
"Ladies and gentlemen, my killbot features Lotus Notes and a machine gun. It is the finest available."
Check out this graph. They seem the believe that electricity used by future TV's will grow faster than the amount of new TV's on the market. I am skeptical of this claim, since it seems to suggest that newer TV's will be more power hungry than the older ones. Does this not account for the new LCD, plasma, and projection (DLP, LCD, and LCoS), which should use significantly less electricity than their CRT coutnerparts?
In any case, looking at the graphs and trying to extrapolate the numbers, it looks like there's a projected 11 and 22% increase in the number of TV's in GB from 2000 to 2020, which (they claim) represents a 50% and 70% increase in power consumption by TV's. The numbers don't work out in any logical fashion, and don't represent the use of new, lower power technology that will almost certainly replace most new CRT's over the next 15 years.
This is beginning to sound like a bit of alarmism...which is sadly typical in the news (especially when it comes to issues of fear, including issues like terrorism or especially the environment and conservation).
Also, another bit of potential stupidity:
This is just silly, because the manufacturers will just pass this cost along to the consumer. The statement is a clear attempt to obfuscate the ultimate payor for the new regulations.This article leads me to the question of whether or not most people are able to question anything when it comes to conservation because it's not PC to question environmental rhetoric.
-Turkey