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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."
Also, what do these critics say that my disabled wife should do to turn on the TV when she can't physically reach the switch? Maybe she should just sit there till someone can do it for here.
MAybe someone wrote it already, but I haven't yet found it. There's quite an easy solution, unfortunately I'm missing a word as I'm not a native speaker. I'm talking about those multisocket things that have a plug on one end of the wire and multiple sockets on the other end of the wire (sorry, can anyone tell me the right word ?). They are available with switches too, at least where I live (germany that is). That switch will turn all sockets on and off at the same time.
For example my PC, monitor, speaker system and some more PC-periphals are hooked to one of these things. So I can switch them off all at once without having to use some master-slave socket or other complicated stuff. Just one switch and all devices are - really - off. The same should be possible for TV, VCR, DVD-Players and so on. Often the VCR is the problem as it looses it's time setting when powered off too long.