Unpluggit

www.unpluggit.co.uk

My brother always disses me for taking his charger out of the socket and he puts his phone in thinking it will charge and then rants it doesnt use power anyway. Well he is wrong and I am a firm beleiver in small sticks and stones grow to large foundations.

So guys and gals please remove your phone charger when you are not using it, save money, save power and help some to save the environment. The WWF also endorse this action, which is nice

Disclaimer: I am not saying this will reverse all polution and environmental issues, but when u read that if everyone in the uk removed their charger when finished each year enough power would be saved to power 33,000 homes, which is crazy.

Cheers,

Find more posts tagged with

Free for TechExams community: Cybersecurity salary guide

Compare cert salaries and plan your next career move

Button

Comments

Plantwiz

ok.....so what's the point with the link?

The link says "DON"T unplug" but only shows the titles of a bunch of old games....but no links or other info.....maybe it's Safari?

seuss_ssues

i have no idea what his link was about....but here you go, i dont know how accurate the numbers stated in the article are...but its still food for thought.

http://www.wisebread.com/green-switch-for-green-savings

Below is from the website; possibly where he got his idea from?

Some scary facts for you:

8-10% of your home’s electricity consumption is due to appliances left in standby mode.
A mobile phone charger uses 2 watts while charging a phone, 2 watts even when the phone is fully charged, and STILL 1.5 watts when the charger is plugged in without the phone.
Home entertainment systems (TV, DVD, audio systems) are the worst culprits, sucking over 28 watts even when all the components are turned off or are in standby mode.
Your stereo will use 23 watts while playing music, and 20 watts while left on but not playing music.
On a grander scale, the Energy Saving Trust claims that appliances on standby produce 50 million tones of CO2 annually.
Energy Saving Trust (a UK based organization) also claims that if one mobile charger per household is left plugged in, enough energy is generated (wasted, really) to provide power to 66,000 households for one year. Yikes.

Schluep

I don't understand the link either, but I never realized how much power was used by appliances on standby. I can't even begin to count how many things I have plugged into various places on standby (that I couldn't possibly get to in order to unplug every night). My cell phone charger currently plugs in behind my bed and is taped to the back of my nightstand so the end of the charger for the phone sits nicely on top without falling behind (same with my bluetooth charger). I want to be able to answer in an emergency if someone calls during the night but don't have any available outlets in the room other than the ones behind the bed so I don't see much to do about even now that I know.

I'll have to read more about the study later to see who funded it and how it was conducted but the numbers from the above posts are fairly eye-opening if they are accurate. It is too late to check Seuss's link since I just hopped on here after a long work day for a few minutes before going to bed (and getting up in five hours).

I just turned off the power on my all-in-one printer just for you Pash

. It usually stays on so if I am using my laptop in another part of the house I can print without thinking about it.

Plantwiz

I have a kill-a-watt and many of the 'high' draw appliances didn't even register even when left on in for 24hrs.

It's been a while, but I wasn't real impressed.

Now, phone chargers and other devices with block plugs are hardly ever left in when not in use around here...I left them in when running my test, but again, the results after 24hours were usually '0' or maybe as high as '2' watts.

Compared with how much draw the Dryer had....it was insignificant....again because it's not soemthing we leave plugged in when not being used.

Still interesting and worth paying attention to.

Pash

sorry the link is missing a g, amended.
www.unpluggit.co.uk

Thanks for the response guys!

Those are some nice facts!

sprkymrk

Pash wrote:

Those are some nice facts!

I'm not sure they are "facts" though. Coming from a background of 12 years as an electrician, I find some of those a bit unbelievable. The largest energy consumption on avaerage always has been the fridge - and for obvious reasons you can't turn that off. It runs almost 24x7, unlike your washer, stove, and microwave that run for an hour or so per day on average.

Other interesting tidbits, which may or may not be true, that I have heard are:

A single bolt of lightning has enough power to run all the lights in NYC for a day.

If you turn the sink off while brushing your teeth, instead of letting the water run, you'll save on average 4 gallons of water per household per day. Multiplied by millions of homes, that's a lot of water.

Schluep

I checked Seuss's link and the author of that particular article does not cite the name of the study, just the name of the not-for-profit government funded organization that conducted it (with the established goal of reducing CO2 emissions by 20% from 1990 to 2010). Combining their stated goal with the fact that the study was not peer reviewed or fully published immediately takes away the credibility of those numbers. I did some searching and couldn't find any credible study (where the details of how the study was performed are disclosed) online either to confirm or deny the claims above. While not a precise scientific study, I did find several people who hooked up a digital power meter and posted their results:

http://www.slashgear.com/standby-myth-debunked-modern-conveniences-are-to-blame-for-excessive-energy-quaffing-124746.php
http://digitalcrusader.ca/archives/2006/10/household_energ.html

Either way I will still start hitting the off button on my printer when I get up from where I am usually sitting right next to it working before I go to bed. It may not save much of anything on my energy usage, but it isn't an inconveniance at all either. You will never see pulling the bed out and unplugging the cell phone charger every morning or getting up in the middle of the night to take my phone off the charger even if it uses 10x what the refrigerator does every night.

I am curious to measure some of mine and will borrow a meter from a relative of mine who is an electrician and test mine out some time. With Easter coming out it would be a good chance to do so when our family gets together.

One final thought, how many users at your office leave their PCs on overnight (hopefully at least logging out of their accounts for security reasons)? Do most of your companies have policies on this or is it left to the user?

dtlokee

I just tried it with a couple AC adapters

My cell phone charger draws .017 amps when a phone is plugged into it and .002 amps when it's not. That is about 2 watts when the phone is plugged in and 0.24 watts when it's not.

My laptop charger draws 2.2 amps when it's plugged in and .010 when it's not. That is 264 watts when it connected and 1.2 watts when it's not.

Like Sprkymrk said when you consider your refrigerator that draws around 1000 watts, and your AC condenser draws around 2000 watts when they're on, you can see it's not very significant. There is far more power loss due to resistance in the transmission lines. It would make sense to have an electrical generating station within a mile of every home and business, that would save a ton of energy, but no one wants them in their backyard. Or develop superconductors at ambient tempatures

dynamik

Schluep wrote:

One final thought, how many users at your office leave their PCs on overnight (hopefully at least logging out of their accounts for security reasons)? Do most of your companies have policies on this or is it left to the user?

We're a small company of about 30, and it's currently left up to the user. Some people are really good about shutting all their things off while some leave everything on, including large CRTs. How lazy do you have to be where you can't simply touch a button as you walk away? I'd like to start developing policies for this type of thing, but we've been so busy, things like that just get pushed back.

RTmarc

The only reason I can think of for not shutting down work PCs when people leave is that - at least with my company - that's when the automated admin stuff happens; WSUS, auditing, virus scans, etc. We have been discussing this very thing for cost savings but the question is whether or not it's worth user interference/impedance and administrative overhead if we do these things during business hours or not.

Schluep

RTmarc wrote:

The only reason I can think of for not shutting down work PCs when people leave is that - at least with my company - that's when the automated admin stuff happens; WSUS, auditing, virus scans, etc. We have been discussing this very thing for cost savings but the question is whether or not it's worth user interference/impedance and administrative overhead if we do these things during business hours or not.

That is exactly what I was getting at when I made my comment. I have been doing some consulting lately and noticed that a number of companies leave their user workstations on for those purposes, others leave them off to save money, and some leave it up to the user.

JDMurray

dtlokee wrote:

My cell phone charger draws .017 amps when a phone is plugged into it and .002 amps when it's not. That is about 2 watts when the phone is plugged in and 0.24 watts when it's not.

My laptop charger draws 2.2 amps when it's plugged in and .010 when it's not. That is 264 watts when it connected and 1.2 watts when it's not.

How are you measuring that? The thyristor in the chargers (power adapters) should not allow any current to be drawn when a device is not plugged into it. It may be the measuring device itself that's drawing the current.

Pash

As I said small sticks and stones lay large foundations. Of course its not realistic to turn off every electrical device you use at work or at home. But leaving a charger or anything that draws power for the sake of not unplugging just doesnt make any sense.

dtlokee

JDMurray wrote:

dtlokee wrote:

My cell phone charger draws .017 amps when a phone is plugged into it and .002 amps when it's not. That is about 2 watts when the phone is plugged in and 0.24 watts when it's not.

My laptop charger draws 2.2 amps when it's plugged in and .010 when it's not. That is 264 watts when it connected and 1.2 watts when it's not.

How are you measuring that? The thyristor in the chargers (power adapters) should not allow any current to be drawn when a device is not plugged into it. It may be the measuring device itself that's drawing the current.

With an inline amp meter (Fluke), but with .010 amps it could be simply error.

JDMurray

dtlokee wrote:

JDMurray wrote:

dtlokee wrote:

My cell phone charger draws .017 amps when a phone is plugged into it and .002 amps when it's not. That is about 2 watts when the phone is plugged in and 0.24 watts when it's not.

My laptop charger draws 2.2 amps when it's plugged in and .010 when it's not. That is 264 watts when it connected and 1.2 watts when it's not.

How are you measuring that? The thyristor in the chargers (power adapters) should not allow any current to be drawn when a device is not plugged into it. It may be the measuring device itself that's drawing the current.

With an inline amp meter (Fluke), but with .010 amps it could be simply error.

Or the Observer Effect.