A delightful piece of sleuthing from Matthew Parris. These figures we keep being told for the amount of electricity being wasted by appliances on standby.
Err, no one actually knows. All the numbers being thrown around are, err, tosh.
Bravo Parris!
14 responses
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Not scientific in any way, but my girlfriend and I have been very conscientious about making sure we unplug all those electrical appliances with a ‘little red light’ at the end of each evening. This means that they remain unplugged from midnight, until about 6pm, when we get home again the next evening.
We received our electricity bill this week, and it was 40% down on the last bill.
As far as we can tell, summer included, there hasn’t been any other significant change in our energy usage. And I’m pretty sure the price per kilowatt hour hasn’t gone down… -
Equipment on standby during the night isn’t accounting for 40% of your energy bill. Something else must have been going on.
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‘Some of us are sure we saw or heard of a claim by the Chancellor…I thought I heard this on a BBC radio news report. A colleague on The Daily Telegraph thinks…’
Come on Tim, I’m a fan of Parris but this is very flimsy. He builds his whole thesis around a half remembered and untraceable statement – did his dog eat it, perhaps? You’d have gone berserk if Polly Toynbee had written similar.
If a blogger had said this without a link they’d have been rightly nailed. If we’re going to start debunking vaguely remembered news reports none of us are going to want for material. -
I’m surprised to learn that a mobile phone charger consumes electricity when not in use. Who’s going to explain the physics to me?
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People already have an incentive to save electricity – they pay for it. That they then choose to prefer comfort is their business.
The government might have a leg to stand on chastising people for their wasteful ways, except that they charge people a carbon tax as atonement for their sins. -
The govenment plans to outlaw TVs with a standby mode in order to save energy. Am I the only one who can see a problem with this idea? Sure, people will save energy at night when they will undoubtedly turn off the equipment rather than leave it on. But how many people would it take to undo this saving if they left their TV on mute instead of standby while they talked on the phone or answered the door etc? Most proponents of energy efficiency ignore so called rebound effects like these, but they are inevitable to some degree, working to lessen the impact of any efficiency method. Replace all your lightbulbs with energy efficiency ones and buy a new Prius – that’s great – but what do spend the money you save on? Unless you bury it in the ground you’re going to be emitting carbon somewhere in the chain.
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Diereme; can’t do physics, I switched from sciences at A level ‘cos my school (a traditional state grammar) didn’t have any decent science teachers.
But I can say for sure that my phone charger, if left plugged in, heats up even when not in use. Unplugging such things undoubtedly saves money.
Biggest electric saving I’ve made recently was not replacing my fridge, it was an old one and obviously horribly unefficient. My freezer doesn’t seem to use half the power, my electric bill has gone down by a 3rd since the old one broke down. -
I’m surprised to learn that a mobile phone charger consumes electricity when not in use. Who’s going to explain the physics to me?
The mobile charger consists of a transformer which steps the voltage down from 240V to 3V (or 4.5V or something). Transformers work by having two circuits beside each other, one of which has current flowing in it which (by way of electromagnetic induction) induces a current in the other. Even if the charger is not charging anything, the first circuit is still complete and hence uses electricity (it gets warm). Alas, the amount of electricity it uses is negligible and will have precious little impact on the ultimate fate of Bangladesh.
Now, can anyone tell me what the point of standby buttons are? I was led to believe the turning on of the TV requires a higher electrical load than steady operation, and the standby mode removed the need for this higher load. Now I am told leaving it on standby uses more electricity. Can someone explain? -
As someone who has a pretty good grasp on physics and stuff, I can assure you that mobile chargers, Hi-Fis, etc. use almost negligible electricity compared with filament lights, fridges, freezers, TVs, etc.
Anything with a large motor (fridge, freezer), anything which gets noticably hot (computer, lights, oven, kettle, toaster), or a large electronic screen (esp. TV) will use a lot of electricity. These are the things you need to look at to cut your electricity bill down, most other things will not make any noticeable difference. -
I blogged on it at the time and thought I had heard the 10% figure – I did a bit of digging and the results are here
http://www.anenglishmanscastle.com/archives/002627.html -
I tackled one of the professors who wrote to The Times supporting a mandatory law to eliminate standby. Instead, why not mandate labelling so that we know the costs of running the appliance in active and standby and let us decide the utility vs. cost tradeoff?
Stupid professor cited his clock radio as one of the devices to be banned. He claimed 5MW to power these devices across the country. I don’t believe that figure, but what the heck I worked the costs out. At just under £400/hour to power them all. We could just shoot a barrister (or better still, a certain ex-barrister) and keep the radios.
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Tim Newman, a mobile phone charger will almost certainly be a switched-mode power supply these days, so quiescent (no load) power consumption will be essentially zero. The charger for my Motorola RAZR sits at room temperature when not charging. Even an old-fashioned transformer based power supply consumes negligible power when not under load. Certainly power supplies in modern televisions and computers are switchers.
The government is not going to outlaw standby power; all it is proposing is that devices should consume no more than one watt in standby mode.
In a previous life I was an electronic engineer; prior to that I studied physics. I can assure everybody that it is well within the skills of even a half way competent engineer to design circuitry for maintaining devices in standby that consume less than a watt (real micropower design is tricky but well understood—in this regime one is talking about power consumption in the microwatt region). One watt is 86400J/day or 0.024 kWh/day (slightly less than 9 kWh/year which at current typical prices costs under 70 pence). By comparison, a typical electric kettle (2400W) operating for 3 minutes consumes 432000 J, which is equivalent to a one-watt consumption for five days. If you run your electric kettle for six minutes a day you’re using ten times as much energy as a one-watt standby device. Furthermore, as equipment is replaced with newer appliances, it is inevitable that standby consumption will decrease to even more nugatory levels. -
5MW across the entire country is so far below the noise level of second by second fluctuations (c.f. the jump in load during the ad breaks during Miss World etc) as to be completely meaningless.
5MW across the country? For Fuck’s sake, that is 80 milliwatts per person.
And as for the example of a CLOCK radio. WTF? It’s a clock. It has to be on or otherwise it won’t be telling the right time.
GAAAAAAAH! -
Sorry, for the less than savvy of you lot out there: 1 milliwatt is one thousandth of a watt, or as Tim would put it 0.1% of 1 watt.
Or to put it another way, if you flicked a 100W bulb on in your cupboard for 3 minutes then switched it off again, you would have used the same amount of energy as your clock radio would consume in a whole 24 hour period.
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