Southern Electric say each mobile phone charger uses 100kWhours a DAY!

[R. Mark Clayton]

They got a k in by mistake. Typical chargers will use about 100Whrs per day.

[meow2222]

Energy from non-oil sources keeps creping down in cost. If this trend continues, one day it'll be so cheap that materials will be the more valued thing, not energy, and it cavity wall insulation might even one day become seen as a waste of good materials.

But not in my lifetime.

NT

[The Natural Philosopher]

Well not knowing yor age, and state of health, and the likelihood of medical advances in geriatrics, thats is a fairly hard thing to be definite about..

..but as far as energy goes, once the technologies for non carbon based electricity come on stream, I think it will be a very rapid transition..a decade or two at most. Thse things are all driven by accounting: If the cost of a new nuclear power station is less than the opportunity cost of continuing running a gas power station..guess what. They will shut off the gas one.

[no$spam!delete&abuse%dave]

In message , Roger Matthews writes

I'm so green I don't use a flushing loo but consider my TVs left on standby to provide background heating.

[John]

"dave @ stejonda" wrote in message news: [e-mail]...

Many manufacturers have been aspiring to the "1 Watt Initiative" for some years.

Even my old 28" CRT only uses 0.8w on standby.

The Green Campaigners are out of touch

[lyttlec]

0.8w*24hr/day*300,000,000 TV's = 5,760,000,000kw-hr/day in tv's only. Now add in cell phone chargers, computers, and stereos. All that energy wasted so we save 1sec when we want to get our daily dose of mind-numbing drivel.

[Bob Eager]

You're another one who likes to distort the truth, then? You might make it a bit more convincing by at least trying to do the calculation correctly.

0.8w*24hr/day = 19.2 watt/hours per day for one TV. Multiply that by 300,000,000 (where did you get the 5 TVs for every man, woman and child in the country from?, but we'll leave that one) and you get 5,760,000 kwH per day.

So, you're three orders of magnitude out (a factor of 1000, in other words). That's using a false assumption of 5 TVs each for everyone in the UK; perhaps you meant some bigger area, but who knows? you conveniently left that out.

Add in the fact that for a lot of that 24 hours the TV would be on anyway. Then also the fact that many people turn the TV off when asleep or not at home.

Greenwash. And highly unconvincing greenwash.

[John]

Where I live the council are proposing Wind Turbines and local businesses are "lined up" to take the Green Electricity". What is conveniently forgotten is the fact that power Stations need to be kept spinning for when the wind drops - unless the businesses are content with power only on good days.

Incidentally, most people I know only uses standby for quite short periods during the evening. The sets get powered down at bed time and left off until the late afternoon viewing period.

[lyttlec]

Ok, I did type kw-hr when I did mean w-hr. my bad. OTOH, I should have used 600,000,000 for the number of TVs. The current estimate for the US population is just over 300,000,000 and we have closer to tvs per person. I know several families of three that have one in each bedroom, one in the kitchen, one in the living room, one in the den. Even if no one ever watches the one in the guest room, it is still using 0.8W. So the correct number is 11,520,000 watt-hours/day. That translates to about 3,417,600 pounds(1709tons) of coal/year, 24,000 pounds of SO2, 1600 tons of CO2 (coal is mostly carbon).

Have you ever noticed that during a blackout, the power sort of fade out rather than goes off all at once? Thats because of all the wallwarts and tv sets discharging into the grid.

[Bob Eager]

All very well, but it makes a hell of a difference. "Sorry, guv, made a mistake. But it's really bad anyway".

So, you're in the USA; I suspected as much. But try to make it clear; this is a UK newsgroup after all.

Two TVs for every man, woman, child and baby? Well, we always knew the Yanks were wasteful. And as for pollution: can we say "Bush - Kyoto"?

If it's switched on at all. My experience is that yes, TVs get left on standby. But not 24/7. At least not in the UK. Typical day; TV is switched on when we get up. It goes off when I leave for work (I'm last out). Goes on when the kids come in. On and off during the evening, possibly on standby sometimes. Total time on standby probably less than an hour or two each day. You can't count the time when it's actually being watched, unless you are bent on distorting the figures.

No; 11,520,000 kWh/day (11,520 MWh/day). Do try to keep up.

Or approximately 1000MWh per day, in reality (dividing by 12 since it's really about 2 hours/day on average; some will be more, some less). Actually, that's probably a high estimate; I can't see very many people leaving (say) the guest room TV on when there is no guest. And are there

*really* that many - two for everyone?

That's for the USA. For the UK (this is a UK newsgroup) it's about a fifth of that. So, 200MWh per day. Worst case - I doubt we have as many as the USA. Be generous and say half. So a (probably high) figure is

100MWh per day.

Our last electricity bill shows we used 30 kWh/day; we might use a bit more than most, but let's say on average it's a third of that. So,

10,000 homes worth of electricity. Out of probably about 20 million, that's not a lot. Even less if you count industry, which is very power hungry.

So, just scare mongering figures really.

Actually, it's a damn sight more CO2 than that since there isn't a one to one relation.

I'd like to hear technical justification for that. I've not seen it, and I guess it depends on what caused the blackout anyway.

[David Hansen]

On 14 Feb 2007 18:03:57 GMT someone who may be "Bob Eager" wrote this:-

Rather depends on the household. I suspect that many are only watched for a few hours a day, as most people have better things to do with their time.

An increasing number probably do. However, this is only since campaigns against leaving things on standby started. However, it is probably true that houses where televisions are watched a lot are also the ones where they are left on standby when not on.

[Bob Eager]

There have been campaigns for a long time now, mainly from the fire service.

[lyttlec]

I assume you still get billed for on-peak vs. off-peak power? I once built a wind power system for a friend of mine in the UK. Cut his peak power usage charges in half. In the US, I built one for a dairy farm that cut his peak-power by 10%, and his total bill by over 80%. His total monthly rate was determined by a 20minute peak. Some simple changes to his local wiring ( so he couldn't start the welder in his shop while the silage augers were running) and adding a wind power system to pump and pre-heat water was all it took.

The Brits isn't any better. There are just fewer of them. To your credit, power rates there do encourage a bit more conservation.

Both suck. Ignore anything any government says. The real solution is simple : turn it off, and ask yourself if you ever need to turn it on again.

As long as it is plugged into the wall, it is on standby. The on-off switch no longer turn them off. On one Phillips TV series I worked on, the on-off switch simply blanked the video and sound. Every thing else was powered up. Power use in 'on" and "off" was almost exactly the same.

Yes, two for everyone. Counting the ones at home, in the bars (the coffee shop where I am now has two running), airports, the displays running in the stores, etc., etc.

100MWh/day is still a sizable power plant.

So it's ok to be wasteful because someone else is worse? You can throw your Starbucks cup on the street because it's only one cup?

Not scare mongering, just shaming you. I spend one day a week picking up trash out of the nice creek that crosses my farm. I pick up over hundred pounds per month of plastic soda bottles, foam cups, plastic bags from the grocer. I carry cloth bags to the grocer, which confuses the clerks no end. Even though I avoid plastic as much as possible ( only buying beer in aluminum cans or re-usable kegs), I still calculated that I use the equivalent of one barrel of oil per year in plastic. That translate to almost a million barrels per day here. Based on my last visit to the UK (just before 9/11), you aren't all that much better there.

Correct, but you get the picture. Carbon + O2 weighs more than the coal (carbon + ash + sulfur +...)

sure. In the past the biggest contributor was electric clocks which change from motors to generators when the grid is lost. Now it is energy stored in power supplies. Wall warts have transformers that store energy that gets dumped back into the grid when grid power is lost. Anything with a ps does the same. The per-unit energy is less now that we use switching ps rather than the older inductor (transformer) based designs, but we have lots more units.

Look up inductors and capicators in an elementary circuit analysis text. One exercise will probably be to build an r-l-c circuit and measure the voltage across the elements when power is connected and disconnected. Another thing to try is to start up an AC motor and monitor the voltage across the power terminals when the power is disconnected.

[Bob Eager]

Most people aren't. Others may clarify.

You're generalising. I have a Philips TV with a fully mecahnical on/off switch. Two years old. Off means off. I've measured it.

[Sam Nelson]

Ancient Sony 25" (4:3) CRT here, which when run through a plugin power meter, registers absolutely flat 0 on standby. Not a flicker. I guess that means 0.something, but considering the newer Panny 29"WS flickers from 0W to 1W on standby with the same meter, it must be 0.somethingsmall.

Duh, yeah.

[lyttlec]

That probably only means that your meter has a resolution of 1W, so the Sony uses

[hairydog]

Because they are cretins.

You can't get that much power out of a 13A socket in a day: it is more than 13 amps.