| Archive for Downsizer For an ethical approach to consumption |
| Chick-pea |
Standby button - friend or foe?The standard "green" advice is to switch off appliances rather than leave them in standby in order to save electricity.My sister who jbexf for an electricity company calculates that it would cost over £7pa to leave her TV on standby. And in my house there are many appliances on standby - I estimate more than 10, so I could stand to save almost £100pa by turning them off at the wall, as well as doing my bit for the planet and all that jazz. Here's the rub. Her husband who jbexf in the electronics industry says standby buttons lengthen the life of the appliance because the inrush spike when you switch them on damages them. That could add up to more than £7pa if I need to replace my TV earlier than need be. And of course there is environmental damage when you replace an appliance, just as there is damage when you use power you don't need. So what's the answer? Is it better to switch off the appliance or leave it on standby? |
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| Bernie66 |
Switch it off. i know of two very serious and potentially life threatening house fires caused by TV's left on standby. Funerals are damn expensive too. | ||||
| alisjs |
I always switch the telly off, but if I switch the digibox off it sulks and refuses to find any signal when I switch it on again......so only 50% green. | ||||
| AnneandMike |
I don't know which is best but we always switch them off because we are trying to reduce our electricity use by 60% - it is working so far but with winter coming, who knows. When we started this an equally bad problem we found was little transformer powered devices all over the place - e.g. the sound system for this computer, that were never switched off because they don't have a switch! I would suggest you also try and find all those little b*ggers and get into the habit of unplugging them. Also with us the halogen spotlights in the kitchen had to go - 400 watts to light a small room! I must have been stupid to buy them in the first place but, with climate change, it is ridiculous that they are even for sale.
Mike |
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| Bernie66 |
I have that problem in the kitchen come diner. Its 4 lots of "4 times 40 watt" plus three "in cupboard" lights and four "under cupboard" lights. My trick is not to replace the bulbs until the last one goes, then just put two in each! |
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| AnneandMike |
If I tried that the boss would have a fit. She likes everything just so. |
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| Bernie66 |
My wife aint too happy either but hey, its a hard enough life without getting wound up over light bulbs 
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| wellington womble |
I'll never have our halogen thingies again - they go all the time, use oodles of power and cost a fortune. The low voltage halogens we put somewhere else becuase of some other reason (I forget what) are all still going (after about 4 years) and uses lots less power. I'm having them next time!
Tellies and stereos go off, because we have either lost or broken all the remotes! Everything else I don't know about, but I really must make this one of my projects some time soon. |
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| puffedpride |
Discussed this re computers on FOE forum.
Somebody posted that if the computer is going to be out of use for an hour, switch it off (for modern PCs) or two hours for older PCs where more energy is required to turn the thing on again. Can anyone confirm that this is roughly right? |
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| Chick-pea |
Thanks for contributing all your opinions and knowledge on this one. I'll be researching it further, but for now I have put a discussion of this topic up on my blog , and I've quoted some of your opinions there.
If you'd rather not be quoted, let me know and I'll take it down soonest. |
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| dpack |
tv unplugged (when i remember  ) and the pooter is on a promise to turn off all it's bits that are not working , i turn off the monitor if it needs to chunter quietly for a few hours .
i wish i was going to be warmer this winter
ughh i'll pretend i didnt think that 
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| wellington womble |
Where can I get a thingy that measures what power things use? An engineer 'friend' of my OH is disputing that significant amounts of power is used on standby, so now I have to make sure (and tell him where to stuff it!) Do I need to be measuring in amps or volts or watt (!?) and what is the thingy called?
Ekeltrickery has never been my strong point! |
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| judith |
I think the point is not that they use significant amounts of power, but rather that several standby lights x 24 hours x every house in the country = lots of juice wasted unnecessarily. To use the technical terminology
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| gnome |
on the subject of computers - i used to leave mine on practically all the time, until an IT expert told me that if the on / off button is not used regularly enough, they deteriorate. he has known many computers to "die" simply because the on button no longer works. completely the opposite to what i would have thought. if you are worried about surge dammage, use an anti surge socket. so more reasons to switch off. we always switch our computers off at the end of day at work, but i hear many firms leave them switched on overnight. what is your company policy? | ||||
| tahir |
Most of ours are terminals which use a lot less lecky, they're all switched off, except the ones that are working overnight. |
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| hedgewitch |
I have also heard the advice that if a computer is left on a lot as it's working constantly, then it's a good idea to re-boot at least once a week. Not that that's a big saving on power 
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| nathanbriggs |
Turn em all off electrcity doesn't "damage" components when it is switched on and off.
We used to make an oscilloscope in which the manual said: "For the longet life of this component: a) never switch it on b) once you switch it on, never switch if off c) if you insist on turning it on and off leave at least one hour between switch operations" This was for an old linear power supply. I can't remember the last component I saw using a linear PSU (except for high end music/hifi gear) Your TV uses about 7W of electricity in standby, some are as low as 5W some are as high as 25W, you can now buy 4 way socket blocks with digital wattmeters built in. I'll try and find a link. Its ridculous to say the inrush (less than 20ms) will use anything like the power of leaving it in standby for more than minutes. Yes there is a risk everytime you switch something on or off but there is a far greater risk of damage by for example bad mains caused by high winds and lightning storms |
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| dougal |
With 'antique' electronics, using valves, which took a while to quite literally "warm up" - it *was* true that the valves would last longer, if left on permanently. The heating and cooling, expansion and contraction, would take its toll on the tiny filaments. With transistors instead of valves (and chips are collections of thousands, sometimes millions of transistors) exactly the opposite is true. They have a sort of service life of however many hours of operation. Run them hotter and you get less hours. But its hours at operating temperature that kills transistors. (OK they don't like abuse either, but thats not relevant.) The point is that for modern electronics, the old advice is quite wrong. Sure you can break switches, especially if you try, but any decent quality switch should be good for many hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of operations. And switches are quite easily replaced (or bypassed). About the only sensible reason for not turning something off properly is the inconvenience of the time it takes to start up from cold - I was originally thinking of the time that computers take to boot, but this applies equally well to fax machines and the like, waiting to receive a call - but not very much else. Most computers can be put to 'sleep' when their consumption drops to (at most) about 1/20 th of energy consumption while running. "Screen savers" waste energy. Put the thing to sleep instead. Otherwise, get them turned off! |
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| 2steps |
we turn off. I don't turn off my pc when I know I am going to be using it a lot on and off in a day but turn off the monitor rather than using a screensaver | ||||
| Vashti |
Not long ago, we shut down one of the PCs only to find that when we came to turn it back on again, it wouldn't come on! I switched out the power supply and it was right as rain, but now the boyfriend is terribly paranoid that shutting down his computer will break it. 
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