PSA - wall warts using power when they're not being used (still plugged in)

[Ed Pawlowski]

I really should but there is a down side. If I don't show Arlen for what he is, he'd never have an orgasm. He'd having fun.

[Arlen _G_ Holder]

Steve Scharf, Mayor of Cupertino,

Grow up.

The permanent record will show this to be a fact, Steve: o You post exactly as a child posts, Steve Scharf.

Grow up.

Never once have you been able to base your claims on fact. o Not even once.

Grow up.

[David Lesher]

And/or look at the wallwart label. If it's "100-240VAC in" or such it's a switcher. Which does not say it draws zero with no load....

The EU gave us a big help on this. Tired of the 100E6/year old chargers in the trash, they mandated smart phones use microUSB, now USB-C. The phone manufacturers pitched-a-bitch until they realized this meant they didn't need to give you a charger. Even Apple, the holdout, saw the light. I see new MacBooks use USB C for charging.

[danny burstein]

In <qtodnq$56g$ [e-mail]> David Lesher [e-mail] writes: [snnniiipp]

And, you can turn them upside down!

[Ralph Mowery]

It seems that the round power plug at the end of some of the wall warts are using the same size and poliarity of that coaxial plug. Used to be almost every device had its own size or poliarity.

I don't know if that is one of the regulations or just companies finally getting it together.

[John McGaw]

In cleaning out my "room of shame" in the basement which was chock full of old electronics I finally sorted out most of the power supplies and such. At least now they are segregated (mostly) in their own labeled boxes. This is no exaggeration: I found 35+ NEMA power cords and at least that many wall wart and other equipment power supplies with voltages ranging from

3.5V to 26V with an assortment of connectors. I found quite a few round (DIN?) connectors all of which varied in some way to make them non-interchangeable. Of the coaxial connectors, there are some that look to be maybe 2mm up to some big ones looking to be more standard but I have found that even though many look identical the external diameters are sometimes just off enough that they can't work in any given bit of equipment. Worst of all sometimes the inner bore is sometimes different too with no rhyme or reason. Oh, and then there are those that have reversed polarity...

If I knew which ones are most likely to be used I'd take the worst of the worst off to the recycling to join the hundreds of pounds of other stuff that I hauled off earlier. Massive SCSI drives with a mile or so of matching cables anybody?

On the other hand, I did find a relative new 1350VA UPS unit which had been buried and, by coincidence, Cyberpower had shipped me two new batteries for troubleshooting a different unit so I married them up and have a good spare UPS now. Don't know if that is a win or not.

Almost forgot. I also found my oldest "good" motherboard vintage circa

1990(?). Made by Micronics it is amazing to look at, having seven EISA connectors plus one ISA, 16 memory slots all filled with what I'm guessing are 256mB sticks. Most obvious is that most of the functions that would be handled today by a single chip are implemented in scores of others, some TTL. Even the CPU cache seems to have been external and implemented in single RAM DIPs. It has only a single connector on the back for a keyboard and there are no IO connectors for drives and such since back then all of that would have been on boards plugged into the MB. RTC and BIOS memory are in separate Dallas Semiconductor modules and there are two potted clock oscillators on the board and one other crystal. On one corner is a fluorescent green tag saying "33MHZ" which I guess must be the bus clock speed(?) I really should send it to the computer museum in Silicon Valley along with the Periscope debugger found in the same box. Or I may build a shadow box frame for it and hang it on my wall as a reminder of how far we've come. This thing is, overall, probably slower than a Raspberry PI.