Energy Supplier Counts Cost of Devices on Standby (bbc.com) 146
UK households could save an average of $183 per year by switching off so-called vampire devices, British Gas research suggests. From a report: These are electronics that drain power even when they are on standby. The figures are based on research conducted on appliances in 2019 but have been updated by British Gas to reflect recent price increases. The Energy Saving Trust (EST) said consumers need to consider which devices they leave switched on.
It estimates households would save around $68.5 per year by switching off all their devices when not in use. The organisation, which promotes sustainability and energy efficiency, did not give exact details of how it came to this figure.
"Stats or prices related to individual appliances depend on several factors, including model, functionality and individual usage," it said.
The savings are almost certainly much lower (Score:5, Insightful)
My guess is that they analyzed how much power is drawn by devices on standby, and assumed you could 100% turn those off in order to achieve these savings. Which means that in the real world, any such savings are far lower.
When I think of the devices on "standby", I come up with: Wifi router, multiple Roku, 6 device chargers, Ring video doorbell, alarm clocks, LED lights on devices like the microwave, XBox Series S, printer, etc. I can imagine that if I was super vigilant in unplugging those devices, it could yield some savings. BUT, there is a cost in such a process is a giant pain in the ass.
Honestly, I would pay the $15 a month to NOT care about this, and just continue my current usage pattern.
It would be better to focus on swapping out our energy PRODUCTION to be clean and sustainable rather than nickel-and-diming our CONSUMPTION.
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They seem to have picked the worst examples too. Modern electronics are covered by EU rules on standby power.
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Indeed. Most devices in standby mode draw very little power.
I have a Kill-a-Watt meter [amazon.com] and measured many of my devices. The clock on the microwave draws less than one watt. Same for the standby mode on my TV and laptop charger.
A simple method to estimate power consumption is to put your hand on the device. If it isn't warm, it isn't drawing much power.
If you want to save energy, turn down your thermostat.
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More devices should have physical power switches. Unplugging the device can inconvenient, depending on where the outlet is. Older TVs had it right.
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If you're in the UK then CPC do some really good switched plugs. Big switch on the top and a small neon indicator to show they're on. I've fitted them to several devices which have come without an actual on/off switch (TV, Kitchen Radio, DAB tuner, printer):
https://cpc.farnell.com/pro-el... [farnell.com]
CPC are always doing offers too so when I bought mine they were around 1.90 GBP each. Well worth it for my use case.
Obviously if you've got switched sockets you don't need them but I live in an old house and most of th
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Not in the UK, but reaching for the outlet (which may be behind something etc) to switch it off is almost as inconvenient as just pulling the plug. Which is why, IMO, the switch should be on the device itself.
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Even more daft given that 99% of UK socket outlets are switched. Typically you only have unswitched sockets on something that is remotely switched and/or you don't want to accidentally be turned off (think fridge/freezer).
If you are plugging them into power strips then just get a power strip with switched outlets rather than chopping plugs of everything.
Re: The savings are almost certainly much lower (Score:2)
Really 99%? As in there are wall switches in every room to turn almost every outlet in your residence on or off? I don't recall that last time I was in the UK, but maybe I wasn't paying attention. I'm in the US and here in a room that might have 4 wall outlets, there might be a wall switch for one or two of those outlets, but certainly not all of them. And of course if there's a ceiling-mounted light or fan, that will be wall-switched.
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Where I live in .au, all power sockets are switched. The switch for each socket is mounted on the same plastic plate as the socket itself. I'm not an electrician but I assume if must be a standard here? Can anyone from .au/nz weigh in?
Re: The savings are almost certainly much lower (Score:2)
Ah, yeah I have seen these in Europe as well, although not everywhere. I would say that if I'm reaching down to hit that switch I might as well just unplug it. My issue in my house is that so many outlets are behind furniture I really can't get to them, switch or no switch.
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More devices should have physical power switches.
Do you really need an off-switch for the clock on your microwave just to save 0.1 watts?
Why not just buy a microwave without a clock? There are many available.
More mechanical switches mean higher costs and more points of failure.
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STBs (at least the ones I have) typically use more than 0.1W, given by how warm they are even when "off".
As for microwaves, the cheaper ones use a mechanical timer and it has a proper switch, just the more expensive ones have a clock and are never completely off.
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As for microwaves, the cheaper ones use a mechanical timer and it has a proper switch, just the more expensive ones have a clock and are never completely off.
That's because you've paid five times as much for a device that does exactly the same thing and they have to add all sorts of crap to it to make you think it's worth paying the extra amount.
I have a (currently) 12-year-old mechanical-timer microwave that I paid $59 for. My neighbours have a $349 non-mechanical microwave of about the same age. Here's how cooking works with them:
$59 microwave: [twist] Cooking starts.
$349 microwave: [beep] [boop] [beep] [beep] [boop] [beep] [beep] [boop] argh dammit [boop]
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My microwave also has a traditional heating element, which I prefer for something like a frozen pizza. The element has failed, so, yeah, now it is pretty much like a cheaper microwave, maybe the defrost function is something useful though.
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I'm glad that works for you, but I like consistency. 30 seconds is 30 seconds with a digital timer. (And I can change do 25 seconds instead if I want a bit less heat than usual.)
And it sounds like your neighbors bought a shitty microwave. Shame on companies that make devices with bad user interfaces, and ship without thoroughly testing and iterating.
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Well, I guess I can duct tape the power strip to the device and use a power strip for each device I want to turn on or off. I could just attach a switch to the power cable though, it would be more convenient than a power strip.
Or, I can just keep it on and not bother with it, after all, it's not a lot of money.
My point is that devices should have this type of switch built in so that more people would turn the devices off instead of only the ones who really care about doing it.
Unplugging the device is inconv
Re: The savings are almost certainly much lower (Score:3)
In addition, I'm less interested in the the parasitic usage and more interested in the difference between keeping them powered 24/7 (with sleep for most of that) vs having all of these fully switched for a year. Power usage during startup can be higher than in normal operation for some devices, and during that startup time the user can't use the device at all.
So for example I'd like to see the difference in energy usage over a whole day in 2 scenarios:
1) TV/cable box has been sleeping for 23 hours and watch
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Cable boxes seem to be terrible for long boot times. Last time I saw a Virgin Media one it took a good 10 minutes to start up and start being responsive. It reminded me of Windows 95, where the desktop would appear but you had to wait another few minutes while stuff loaded before it became useful.
The other thing to consider is the potential for damage if items are left turned on. If there is lightning or some other electrical issue that causes a voltage spike, and the device is in standby, it might get dama
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I buy energy star products. For a tv, that means half a watt in standby mode.
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Re:The savings are almost certainly much lower (Score:4, Funny)
Unless you're married and she's over 50. In which case she'll be happy to remind you - every day - that 21C is freezing and 23C is boiling hot.
Re:The savings are almost certainly much lower (Score:4, Funny)
I think you have that reversed from personal experience. 21C is boiling hot and 23C is freezing. It's kind of like the weather in the midwest... wait 15 minutes and it will change.
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The number of households in the UK that use air conditioning is insignificant.
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We're also converting AC power to DC power dozens of places all over our homes. I would think there'd be too much power loss to convert the house to have dedicated 12v and 5v wiring to every room compared to the efficiency gains of only having one AC-DC converter.
Just under my desk, I probably have 10 power bricks, half 5v and half 12v. Even if it was just one DC power adapter for an outlet, I don't think USB-C is good enough for power distribution yet and there might be more wasted power than the status
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Tried getting a powered USB hub and only plug in its wall-wart, not the link to the computer?
Back when those USB bitcoin mining sticks came out suddenly miners needed lots of USB ports with lots of power, so there were rather beefy 7 port USB hubs that took external power. Haven't seen them in a while, though, but might still be around.
Distributing DC without needing signalling is not too difficult. If you can solder and do a bit of woodwork for the housing you can make your own. It's just that everyone u
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How many USB hubs do you know that have multiple USB-C ports implementing the full USB-PD standard with variable voltage and amperage? This would be a new device by necessity.
Cramming it into a power strip would require something very compact - and more expensive like a GaN circuit board.
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Low voltage (5V) wiring needs bigger cables than 220V wiring for the same current. The reason is voltage drop. Losing 1V from a 220V line is less than 0.5%, losing 1V from a 5V line is 20%, so the 5V line needs thicker cable despite carrying much less power.
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This gets me wondering if we should have a whole house inverter that changes 240 volts or 120 volts to something like 48 VDC, and have each outlet negotiate with the device on how much voltage it will get, similar to how USB-C can negotiate up to 48 volts to get a lot of charge on skinny little wires, and be smart enough to tell the difference between a smartphone versus a fork. By having one inverter might just save electricity than a ton of devices doing their own inverting. Plus, it would make battery
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To avoid having wall-warts plugged into outlets, how about we build wall warts right into the outlets, even the unused ones? That's basically what it would look like. Also, it would require two sets of wiring and two sets of outlets (kettle for example would still need 220V). I think that regular wall-warts are cheaper.
Re: The savings are almost certainly much lower (Score:2)
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Yeah, my previous post was sarcastic. If having a power supply plugged into the wall with nothing connected to it is a problem (wasted power), then having it built into the outlet does not make the problem go away, it makes it worse, because now you can't just unplug it.
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But for power consumption, they most likely are the same as a regular power supply that's always plugged in.
Re:The savings are almost certainly much lower (Score:5, Informative)
Lower voltages lead to higher losses. They're called IIR losses and as the voltage goes down, the current goes up. But the losses with that current going up by the square.
It's why power lines are in the megavolt range - you want to carry as little current as possible to lower the losses as much as possible. Doubling the voltage to get half the current means you lose 1/4 the power.
The power lines going from the substation to the transformer (pole pig) are only on the order of 30-50A or so. Compare that with your house which may get 200A service. (The voltage to the transformer is typically 7200V phase to ground, or 30 times the voltage your house gets of 240V single phase, but it also means 1/30th the current flows or it will lose 1/900th the amount of power than if it ran at 240V.
It adds up.
Re: The savings are almost certainly much lower (Score:2)
Sure they have- it's called a cell phone.
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Are we talking just about idle coffee makers, or home insulation? The latter is by no means nickles or dimes, and is more cost-effective than producing more electricity.
https://theclimateadvisor.com/... [theclimateadvisor.com]
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I have pretty good branch circuit level metering on my house. Purely parasitic loads while sleeping across 7 Sonos speakers, one multi-port charger, a TV, a UPS, and 4 little wall warts last night was 277Wh (slept in today, 9h sleep). That's about 100kWh/year.
In contrast, my CCTV and network consume about 2.2MWh/year. (Cameras and NVR are about half of that.)
There might be better things to focus on.
First world focus (Score:2)
When most of the world cannot afford a clean source of cooking fuel, the concern about being nagged about parasitic loads that are a mere 5% of the energy use of a "CCTV and network" is a good problem to have.
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Re: The savings are almost certainly much lower (Score:2)
In that vampire load, I also exclude the water heater and "home server", though I do account for them separately. I replaced my traditional tank water heater (it failed) with a heat pump (no gas hookup available and not enough electrical capacity at home for a tankless) and the energy usage is abo
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Those folks living paycheck to paycheck are spending 10 times that much at the pub and are 10 times less likely to worry about the standby power of their electrical devices.
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Those folks living paycheck to paycheck are spending 10 times that much at the pub and are 10 times less likely to worry about the standby power of their electrical devices.
Wow poor people shaming. And a mod up for you. WTF is wrong with Slashdot.
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Yeah, I recognized that a moment after I posted, and yet the point is still valid. It seems clear that most (not all) of the folks who could benefit from this kind of electrical micromanagement, will not, for various reasons.
Rising power costs, by the way, will be very necessary to bring those costs up to level where customer behavior can be influenced, to facilitate virtual power plant schemes that will help renewables succeed. Presumably though, the subsidies and assistance for lower income customers wi
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Germany and others should have thought twice about ditching nuclear and coal; now your living off Putin's gas and you will suffer for your willingness to die on the altar of climate change.
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Germany and others should have thought twice about ditching nuclear and coal; now your living off Putin's gas and you will suffer for your willingness to die on the altar of climate change.
Europe's use of Putin's gas has nothing to do with nuclear or coal and everything to do with foreign economic policy setup by the USA at the end of the cold war. Gas can be had from many places, the west traded with Putin due to an economic principle which said that wealthy countries become stable countries.
But hey you got a piece of anti-globalwarming bullshit out and you even managed to get modded up for it, so I legitimately tip my hat to you.
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Nuclear and coal produce electricity, not gas. The issue is not the price of electricity, it's that most homes are heated by gas and switching to an electric heat pump is quite expensive.
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https://api.misoenergy.org/MISORTWD/operations.html?fuelMix [misoenergy.org]
https://marketplace.spp.org/pages/generation-mix [spp.org]
https://www.pjm.com/markets-and-operations [pjm.com]
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Of course you would privileged wealthy westerner. In the meantime there are a large number of people in the UK and mainland Europe who were living paycheck to paycheck *BEFORE* the cost of energy increased 4 fold.
At least they get to brag about how green they are.
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I've never heard poor people brag, what's wrong with you?
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TV and Blu-Ray (Score:5, Insightful)
We can turn off our TV and Blu-Ray player at the power strip. If you turn on the power strip, then turn them on, you have to wait between half a minute to a minute for them to "boot" So, I'm not sure how much power you are saving by turning those off. According to our Kill-A-Watt, they use around half a watt-hour a day on standby.
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Cable box. I believe that's the "damn, it's still booting up?" TV-side grill hardware that no one wants to say aloud for some reason.
TFA says that consumers could save up to £55/year by switching devices off when not in use, and yet almost half of that estimated savings, is coming from one device.
There's your "vampire".
And I would agree with you. Kill-A-Watt's are great for this kind of stuff.
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Oh no, a whole minute! Also if your Kill-A-Watt is saying you're using half a watt-hour a day on standby then you're not representative of the devices you find in peoples houses. Heck my 2 year old cable box used 20W on "standby". I say past tense because we're cable free for 2 months now.
Our 10 year old TV uses about 7W in standby, my hifi about 20W.
0.5W is what the remote controlled power strip uses.
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Oh no, a whole minute!
Right, and that whole minute, on the TV, is using ~380W of power. So I'm using *more* power turning the TV off at the power strip, unless I'm going on vacation or something and not using the TV at all for a week.
And, yes, our devices sip electricity on standby, as I put them into "sleep" mode in the settings, which adds a few seconds of startup time instead of a full minute. I'm unaware of a cable box that has a similar setting.
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You say "every time the power goes out" as if it's a normal and frequent occurence. Do you live in a third world country with an unstable electric grid?
Trees near power lines. (Score:2)
I am trying to stop laughing about the visual image I have of "dicks with trees near power lines."
It is a good practice to keep one's dick away from trees near power lines.
That's why in the EU there are strict regulations (Score:4, Informative)
Essentially your device must only consume up to half a watt when in standby. However once it's providing some service (e.g. displaying a clock) it may consume more.
However the days when a TV-set would consume 30 Watts in standby are long gone.
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However the days when a TV-set would consume 30 Watts in standby are long gone.
Those TVs however are not long-gone. We bought out TV in 2011 and there are no signs that it needs replacing anytime soon. I think my father's TV is 5 years older than that.
The standby laws only came in in 2013. My brand new hifi has a "sleep mode" the manual is very clear that it is not to be called "standby" precisely because it's not considered a standby mode according to the EU regulations.
That's the beauty of the EU regulations. You need to switch into a "low power mode", but only the ones you call "st
Bollocks of an article (Score:5, Informative)
Firstly, the Watt rates per hour they quoted don't meet any modern standards.
For example, most TVs are said to be anywhere between 1W and 3W on standby these days. Let's say that a TV runs on standby for the full year and consumes an average of 2W per hour. That is 2W * 24h * 365.25 days = 17.52 kWh. Current cap on the electricity unit rate in the UK is set at £0.2834. This gives us £4.97 for an average modern TV, not £24.61!
They are talking completely out of their bums about overcharging and battery wear. Firstly, electronic controllers on modern phones and laptops stop the supply of electricity when full. Secondly, the logical battery capacity that the user sees is usually lower than the physical capacity, capped so that even charging the battery to the maxium doesn't put it in a state of a maximum charge, causing excessive wear.
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most TVs are said to be anywhere between 1W and 3W on standby these days
My 4-year old LG 43-inch TV uses between 0.1 and 0.2W on standby (so little the meter struggles to settle). That's another order of magnitude smaller still.
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Of course it does, the EU mandates a maximum of 0.5W for a TV on standby since 2013. Problem is not everyone has a 4 year old TV.
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Not "watts per hour", but watts. Watts per hour is a measure of how fast your power consumption (or more commonly, generation) is changing.
If your TV's power consumption increased at 2 watts per hour for a year it would be using 2W/h * 24h * 365d = 17.5 kW at the end of the year, which is a lot!
Re: Bollocks of an article (Score:2)
You multiplied 3 units which had time and had a result without a time unit?
17kWh/year isnâ(TM)t that much, in the US that costs you 50c-$2 depending on where you live.
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Oop, that's what I get for copying the GP's format. That should just be "1 year" (or "365 * 24h") rather than "24h * 365d".
17.5 kWh/year is fine, but 17.5 kW for a TV is not. That's about how much two electric showers pull while running, or ten fan heaters. 17.5 kW for a month would be almost 13,000 kWh. It's a bit much for a TV in standby.
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these days.
What do you define as "these days" and have you taken a survey of how old some TVs are? TVs on sale in Europe are actually 0.5W "these days" (and all days since 2013), but the reality is that there are many old TVs still in active use.
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This is just a unit rate, mate. The per-day standing charge (distribution in your country) is £0.4534.
The answer is two-fold:
- Firstly, the pandemic and the war. You could get around £0.10-0.15 per unit and £0.05-0.20 standing charge on fixed-term tariffs before the world to crap, but now all the fixed-term plans are more expensive than the market cap, so everyone's staying on the variable tariff with the caps quoted above (caps only apply to variable tariffs because on a fixed-term tariff
Re: Bollocks of an article (Score:2)
I live in the UK and from April 1st my rate exploded to £0.42/kWh. The reason for this is the idiotic system that the National Grid has here: the wholesale price of power is defined by the MOST EXPENSIVE of all power sources. Since Gas has skyrocketed, even though it makes up for a small part of the power production, it defines the wholesale price. Consumers pay through the nose, while power producers make lots of money as they sell at a crazy price.
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Oh dear I suggest that you go do some research. Gas makes up the bulk of the England's power generation. For the UK as a whole as I type it's 67% of electrical generation. Now if Scotland where independent we would be laughing as it's all hydro, nuclear or wind with just 4% coming from a single plant that as I understand it runs off what used to be flared off the oil fields in the North Sea.
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Gas is ~35% [statista.com] of the UK's electricity generation. I'm not sure I'd call that the bulk, although it is the biggest single source.
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Don't know how you got 35% from that but it's bollocks. There are at least two sights that have a live dash board. So last night it was 67% right now it's 54% That's the bulk of the UK electricity coming from gas https://grid.iamkate.com/ [iamkate.com].
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I got it by dividing 111 TWh (electricity generated from gas in 2021) by 312 TWh (total electricity generated in 2021), which is about 35%. The site you linked says 38.8% from gas over the past year, which is close enough to 35% that I don't think 35% is bollocks.
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up to 40c/kWh in Calif.
Minor quibble (Score:2)
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If you have perfect convection and don't have warm spots near those devices. I don't think that happens much in the real world, though.
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If you have thermostats in your house, that heat will reduce the energy consumed by your central heating.
That is a very inefficient way to heat a house. Carnot cycle and transmission losses mean you only get 40% or less of the heat energy in the gas burned to generate the electricity.
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We have the physics winner here. Same goes for energy saving bulbs. Mostly the bulbs are on when it's dark, and that's mostly the winter and well in the UK you mostly have your thermostatically controlled central heating on in the winter. If you have gas central heating it might be cheaper, but then I am in Scotland so 96% of all my electrons are low/zero carbon which is better.
The fuck wits that wrote this article need to go back and do some elementary thermodynamics first.
Is Scotland the UK version of Canada? (Score:2)
USians have these neighbors called "Canadians" who go on and on about their virtuous hydroelectric-sourced power.
Waaiiit!
Are a good number of "Canadians" descended from people who got kicked out of Scotland by wealthy English landowners?
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Damn, changing "aye" into "eh?" didn't work.
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It gets way worse than that. If you don't heat your house, you're not just a little cold and uncomfortable - you fucking die.
My numbers (Score:3)
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What shocked me is how much the amplifiers where using when turned on but not playing any sound, nearly 50W each.
That is shocking.... ly low for an amplifier. Be happy you don't have a Class-A amplifier design. My 100W/ch amplifiers pulled 800W each from the wall before I replaced them a few years back. High-end audio is overwhelmingly to this day typified by woefully inefficient designs.
It's only recently (past 10 odd years) that highly efficient Class-D amplifiers started finding their way into the premium audio world.
You'll find a lot of devices these days draw less than 0.5W on standby to meet EU regulations, but
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Also, personal preference, but I grew up at a time when it was advised to unplug devices during an thunderstorm to prevent electrical surges destroying them. I even remember the power going out a handful of times during a storm when I was a kid.
Obviously, the grid is a lot more robust these days due to semiconductors but I still turn off all of my expensive toys with the power
Cable Boxes (Score:2)
Cable boxes were historically among the worst of devices. They would consume a good amount of power, and turning them off simply shut off the picture output without reducing power consumption at all. I'm sure there are still a ton of those out there, despite the shift towards streaming. I figure the big consumer in our house would be the computer that are left on. Even with everything "off," the house is still typically pulling 0.4kW.
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Huh? (Score:2)
Bollocks (Score:3)
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This "study" was done by a company with a vested interest in you using more gas and less electricity. I'm going to assume that every other word is a lie.
Here's some factoids for you:
a) Electronic components don't run on gas so turning them off doesn't help you conspiracy to increase gas use.
b) Gas makes up a significant portion of electricity so turning devices off would outright contradict your conspiracy to increase gas use.
c) There's a push to get massive reduction on gas use right now so that the electricity prices get under control again (because of the aforementioned link between gas and electricity). Companies like British Gas are losing money due to
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This "study" was done by a company with a vested interest in you using more gas and less electricity. I'm going to assume that every other word is a lie.
You do know that British Gas is also an electricity supplier?
They will give you tips on saving gas too.
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Oh when I where a lad, *ALL* British Gas sold was gas. So you must have been born at least post 1986 then. No get off my lawn.
Dubious facts here... (Score:2)
As many commenters have pointed out, there's some serious holes in the calculations made to derive this saving.
They seemed to be based on ancient appliances, rather than modern ones.
The fact is, if you want to really save on energy use, there's just so many better ways to do it:
1. Only run dishwasher when full
2. Wash clothes less often, use the eco settings (even though they take longer, they use less power)
3. Avoid the tumble drier - in winter, make use of radiators for drying
4. Get into the habit of turni
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3. Avoid the tumble drier - in winter, make use of radiators for drying
You may well end up spending all of your savings on mould and rot treatments if you do this too much.
Re: Dubious facts here... (Score:2)
Hey it's UK we're talking about. They use hotwater bottles while sleeping, not to keep warm, but to weigh down the covers so they don't fly off in the cold draft. I don't think mold is going to be an issue.
Article is right on target, IMO (Score:2)
It's very unfortunate that it quotes annual prices in British pounds, though. It really should have annual kWh, since people in different countries pay a different price. And even UK utility customers will not pay the same per kWh rate over time.
I live in a very large home, with hundreds of plug-in devices, and dozens of hardwired appliances as well. I have been slowly measuring the power consumption for each plug-in device. Not using a Kill-a-watt, mind you, but using smartplugs with energy metering, speci