It rather depends on what is meant. 10% of what? I think it would be a huge exaggeration to say that 10% of the whole household bill is wasted keeping stuff on standby.
It would sound a bit more credible if it meant that putting a device into standby would reduce *its* consumption to 10% (instead of to 0% if it were totally off). Or would it?
The 10% figure was the proportion of household usage due to items left on stabdby, not the usage of individual devices.
Quite a few Freeview STBs use far more than 5% of full power when in "standby".
MBQ
My doorbell transformer feels warm, but I measured the consumption at 2-3W.
(About the same cost as a couple of PP3s per year, but more reliable; the first battery I tried died after half-a-dozen test presses.)
10% of my quarterly electric bill would be £10, about 65kWh. That equates to a standby consumption throughout the house, of about 30W, night and day.
That is not unlikely, even considering the devices would sometimes be in use so not on standby. I think just my V+ box, when I had one, consumed 27W in standby, and it couldn't be turned off if it was set to record programs.
On the other hand, put another way, going to the trouble turning off
*everything* at the socket when not in use, might save £40 a year. Hardly a fortune.
Yeah, let's make up some numbers. That's what the melons do whenver they want to tell others what to do.
I note you carefully snipped the part where I pointed out that the actual usage on standby is 0.2% for a typical device. Typical greenybollocks - go for the largest number possible.
So the solution is to leave the appliances on all the time, that way there will be no standby wastage.
I agree with you for very old ones, but not slightly more recent ones. I suspect the problem with newer ones built as cheaply as possible is that off-load, they're hitting saturation, because the transformer core has been skimped on.
However, in almost all cases nowadays, switched-mode look to be comming in even cheaper than iron lump ones, so hopefully the iron lump ones will quickly vanish.
The 10% figure was the proportion of household usage due to items left on stabdby, not the usage of individual devices.
Quite a few Freeview STBs use far more than 5% of full power when in "standby".
Standard Sky boxes (not sure about + and HD) consume >90% of their "on" power on standby.
Here are some actual measurements I just made on my old Grundig GDS200
Line voltage presently 241V
Standby
83mA (20.003W)Power on
87mA (20.967W)A difference of 964mW !!!!! They have no right to call it standby, but you may have noticed on their "barker" channel they make a big deal about being able to light all the homes in Exeter with the saving.
Sounds like Clarkson. He _intends_ to be silly.
Andy
"barker" channel
There have been some sat boxes that actually use more power in standby, since they carry on doing exactly the same, but then also turn on a LED that says "standby" beside it!
Or leave it on all the time and the greens can "prove" that standby wastes 100% of the power.
Although, to be fair, if the device was never used, and served no purpose, 100% of any power it did use _would_ have been wasted.
#Paul
It's warming the house. At some times of year 100% of the "waste" may be useful heat. Over the year it's going to be a lot less than 100% wastage.
MBQ
True enough, it may be useful heat, but it's expensive useful heat.
Each kWh of wasted electricity saves you burning 1.3 kWh of gas, or thereabouts, depending on how efficient your boiler is. But the cost of the electricity you "waste" is still several times that of the gas you save.
Indeed - my Pure Evoke 1XT radio uses about the same on as standby, and the Virgin/Samsung STB isn't much better. My measurements, so usual caveats.
Rob
Not so much these days, as about 50% of the electricity is supplied from coal or nuclear power..which are not going up as fast as gas is.
Mind you, windpower is set to triple the price of electricity and mandate the use of MORE gas,
I can only go by the prices I see. My supplier charges 10.28p/kWh for electricity and 2.685p/kWh for gas (inc VAT, tier 2 rates). That's a factor of 3.8, which in my book still qualifies as "several".
Umm. Off peak leccy is less than 5p.. And oil is about 6p as well..
Dont have gas here.
But the appliances which have standby modes are generally connected to the normal 24h supply, so the power you waste on them will not be charged at the cheap off peak rate, but at full price.
For the purposes of this remark I'm assuming something which may or may not be true, namely that you have two meters: One off peak to power storage heaters etc, and one full price to power everything else.
If instead you have a single meter which charges everything at the cheaper rate during off peak hours, then part (30%?) of your waste will be cheaper, but these tariffs generally charge you *more than* full price during the day, so overall it will perhaps cancel out.
That's too bad. Then in your case the factor is smaller, and you can feel less guilty about wasting power from standby devices than the rest of us.
I daresay there are some items for which this is true. But equally there are plenty that are only plugged in & switched on when actually used, for these there is 0% standby power waste.
Then there are things that are used a higher percentage of the time, such as tvs, routers in busy households etc.
NT
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