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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."
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.
I'm not saying we shouldn't conserve energy, but these kinds of calculations are often off by orders of magnitude.
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.
616000 people is alot to fly. Think about it. That's 290 people per plane on 767's, or about 210 planes.
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
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.
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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.
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
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?
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]
Either way, you New Yorkers reading this wouldn't want the Entire population of Glasgow in your city ;o)
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_
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 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
Anyone wondered if the light of the fridge gets off when you close it?
I love deadlines. I like the whooshing sound they make as they fly by.
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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
You think we're downsizing planes?
Just wait 'till Chirac turns up in his nice new presidential A380. "Hey is that Airforce One? What a cute little plain that 747 was".
A380 - When a SUV gets too cramped.
Watch this Heartland Institute video
... what would happen if all those Glaswegians actually did fly to New York. I have a feeling it would be much worse than some wasted kilowatt hours.
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.
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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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.
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.
US TV: "Power" button on the TV itself and the one on the remote do exactly the same thing: switch between "on" and "standby". The only way to get it off is to unplug the mains cord.
European TV: Power button on the TV requires some finger pressure and physically disconnects the power, leaving the remote impotent. The "power" button on the remote only puts it into standby.
Of course there are exceptions but this has typically been the situation with my and my family's relatively modern CRT TVs on both continents.
"Patriotism is your conviction that this country is superior to all other countries because you were born in it." -- GBS
Or one could just like, you know, replace the broken switch instead of buying a whole new device.
I know this might sound a little strange but I actually looked into getting a pre-pay meter installed so that I could find out how much leccy was costing me. I couldn't believe the cost of it though. You have to pay for the meter (if you want one installed by request), electricity costs more and you have the hassle of getting the card charged up.
I think it is absolutely stupid that we make the people that can least afford it pay the most for electricity.
I used to have a better sig but it broke.
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
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.
None. Motion activated sensors would know if someone is in there who shouldn't be. I expect that local government could slash energy consumption by enforcing some kind of "out of hours" energy tax aimed at lights, computers etc. being left on over night. Companies would certainly enforce a turn off policy if it was hitting them in the wallet.
Not such a good test. Off is Off. Try leaving the monitor on for 10 hours, in standby. Then see how quickly it comes 'on'. Most CRT monitors leave a low voltage on the CRT filament, to keep it a bit warm, and sometimes a bit of keep-alive voltage in the high-voltage section, tho that isn't so useful today. The other logic and such is easy to start up, so while the filament comes to full temp in perhaps 5 seconds, everything else is alive and well. Flat panel monitors usually don't suffer from the delay in getting the backlight or plasma warmed up and fully on. Another good reason to spend 5x the cash and use 3x the natural resources to buy that HD panel. Go for it! rick
deleting the extra space after periods so i can stay relevant, yeah.
The amount of energy consumed by the first coil in the transformer (the one plugged into the wall) is proportional to the amount of energy consumed by the second coil (the one with the switch in it). This is because a coil stores energy like a capacitor. There is a finite amount of energy that the coil can store, so when that amount of energy has been stored, the coil will no longer draw a current (this works very much like a switch). When the stored energy is used, (for example, when a current is induced in the second coil), the coil will draw enough of a current to replace it. So, when you turn off the switch on the second coil, the first coil will cease to draw a current (of course, a small amount of energy will be dissapated in the form of heat, since there is no such thing as an ideal conductor). This is why your power company can put several step-down transformers in the power grid as electricity finds it's way from the generation plants to your house, and yet the load on the generation plants varies based upon the amount of power used, not by the number of transformers in the grid.
This is also a good concept to remember in the context of this discussion. A CRT uses a very large electro-magnetic coil. When you first power this coil up, it draws an enormous current (if your house is wired poorly, you will see your lights dim). That energy is not dissipated, however; rather, it is stored in the coil as an electromagnetic field. As that field is used to control the electron ray that generates the image on the screen, the electromagnetic field is consumed, and the coil draws a current (much smaller than the initial current) in order to replace it. When the CRT goes into standby, that electromagnetic field is no longer being consumed, and the only current being drawn represents the energy being dissipated as heat -- the more efficient the design, the lower this current will be. Remember, there is a large amount of energy stored in the coil, and a small amount of energy being consumed. When you switch off the CRT, the circuit of which the coil is a part is broken. When this circuit is broken, the entire electromagnetic field will be dissipated at once as an electromagnetic pulse, wasting all of the energy that it was storing. So, depending on how often you use it, standby may waste less energy that repetedly turning the device on and then off again.
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?
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.
No. kWh is NOT Kilowatts per hour, it's Kilowatts times hours, aka Kilowatt-hours.
On top of that, kWh/yr isn't wrong at all, it is merely an equivalent to Watts that makes it easier to calculate how much money (power companies usually charge by the kWh) is wasted by the device over the course of one year.
There are tons of devices on standby right now. They just don't ever bother to tell you, so you THINK it's off.
That's for sure. And there are even more devices where it isn't even standby - they're wasting power when "off" while providing no added functionality at all.
Anything with an A.C. adaptor feeding it is generally wasting power all of the time it is off. Switching designs help, but most adaptors have transformer core losses being fed all the time. I've found the same thing internally in some devices. Looking around the house, I found that my soldering stations and a table radio had the power switches wired after the transformer. Some things that have transformers or whole power supplies live all the time include doorbells, thermostats, garage door openers, VCRs, CD/DVD players, cable/satellite boxes, printers, and cable/DSL/dialup modems. I remember the shock at discovering that my old electric toothbrush had a stand with a field coil powered all the time. The coil was the powered portion of a motor to wind a spring in the hand-held unit.
Contrary to what the article says, cable boxes could be designed in a way where they could be shut down. The boxes could designed to handle revalidation only when a box is on. Data when off could be retained by a small amount of CMOS memory and a capacitor, or by using flash memory. Switching on the main power supply could be done by passing power for devices it feeds signal to through the box, and sensing load current to trigger starting the power supply. I don't think we should be paying for energy just to make someone's DRM work.
Devices with timers could be designed to run from charged capacitors. Small half-Farad capacitors are available. Some devices use lithium batteries, but I prefer to avoid those since they're toxic waste later.
I reduced the power consumption of an old L.E.D. digital alarm clock from 8 Watts to 1.2 Watts by replacing the transformer with a capacitive voltage divider, and eliminating the series-pass regulator by using S.C.R.s in place of two of the diodes in the bridge rectifier and controlling those. That savings was enough to power a bedroom color t.v. 2 hours a day.
I'd like to see someone design a cordless phone that was efficient enough to get by with powering the base unit from the phone line. They could at least use a switching supply for the base unit. Few people really need to have their microwave ovens programmed in advance to come on at a certain time. For years I kept my old microwave with a rotary knob mechanical timer. That oven didn't use any power when off. Most U.P.S.es could be designed to use less power once the battery is charged - they'd probably get better battery life too.
Devices that are powered all the time are at a greater risk of being fried by line surges.
On my old computer I wired an outlet box to the switched monitor power outlet. Then things like my modem and amplified speakers would have the power cut when the machine was off. If the machine had been designed to control that outlet in sleep mode, consumption could be cut even more. Having those items powered from the computers switching supply instead of transformers would save even more.
Sometimes when shopping I ask salespeople how many kilowatt hours per year a product uses when turned off. It's entertaining to see the weird looks I get. If a few more of us asked suppliers about these things it might speed design changes. Designers need to be educated about the need for reduced consumption also. Sometimes it seems like many don't worry about it except when too much heat is produced.
Consumers tend not to think of low power leeches as costing anything, but it adds up over the life of a product. Where I am it runs about $1 (U.S.) per month for every 10 Watts used continuously. In hot climates where air conditioning is used, waste costs are compounded with those to remove the waste heat from these devices.
Don't know, whether you have any specific emissions in mind, but I'd call this statement plain wrong. Currently total airflight energy use is about a quarter of total car traffic energy use (but admittedly airflight is growing at an alarming rate). Airplanes produce more emissions per distance, and also some particularily nasty types of pollution (water vapor in high altitudes, for instance, is a greenhouse factor), but it's not anywhere near surpassing car traffic in total, yet. (energy consumption in the UK. See page 14)
On standy: Yes, in many cases it makes life easier. However there is no wrong at all in 1) informing people that standby power usage is non-zero. Note that in some cases of bad design it's even quite considerable. Some inkjet printers use 15 Watts in standby - what for? 2) Pressure manufactures to make full-power-off reasonably easy.
Yes, there are areas other than standby, where (greater) amounts of energy can be saved. But also in many, many, many cases, summing up to hundreds or even thousands of megawatts, standby is just plain useless. Standby for a TV - ok, nice feature to have, if you like. Standby for a PC / printer / CD-/DVD-player? Heck, I'm typically right in front of those, when I want to start using them. What do I need standby for? Provide me with the option, fine, but give me an easy opportunity to switch them off fully, if only to reduce the risk of fire, or the damage done if lightning strikes nearby.
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.
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Dum de dum.
Freedom is not the license to do what we like, it is the power to do what we ought.