Following on from my power thoughts, here’s a fairly in-depth discussion of the standby power problem (ie: the lack of hard on/off switches). Doesn’t change my opinion on the relative waste elsewhere, but it’s worth a read as a well-written article. It’s worth noting some modern TVs (mine included) manage the 1 watt standby power that’s mentioned.
Interstingly enough,it’s always said that power consumed on standby is wasted. This is of course, untrue if it’s winter and you heat you house. Most of this ‘wasted’ energy is dissipated as heat, so some of it (not much, I’ll grant you) will be offset against your heating costs.
[Update]
Looks like the BBC have been thinking along similar lines to me.
Oddly enough my TV manual suggests you turn it off standby (its a Ferguson) and the Energy Saving Trust reckon you can save £40 by just turning off your TV Standby. That’s got to make sense. Next thing I need is some K-Glass for the double glazing….
Probably more sense for an old one. My TV only uses 1W on standby, so you can run it for 1000 hours (~41 days) on one unit of electricity, or put another way, 9 units of power per year, very roughly. At about 15p per kWh, That’s not much of a saving.
With an old TV though, you could be using 30 or 40 times that.
I’d say the K-glass is worth having, provided you need the double glazing anyway- then it’s worth the small extra cost.
so 9 * 58,000,000 sets = a saving of 522,000,000 watts overall during the year – thats a lot of power and co2!
We’re going in circles- you’d save millions more of kWh by stopping some of the things in my rant.
Here’s one for you: A 15kW patio heater. Run that for say 3 hours outside. I don’t know how much that will cost, as it doesn’t say how much gas it burns, but it will pump 45kW straight into the atmosphere, and a lot of CO2 as well. That 45kWh would run even an old TV at 30W for 1500 hours, or about 2 months, and the thing is they’ve become really popular. Every retard has one. People routinely use a tumble dryer because they can’t be arsed hanging washing (at 3kWh- so 1 kW of power every 20 minutes).
I’m not saying it’s not a good idea (apart from the fact my TV has no real power switch), it’s just there are better targets. Much better targets. Steer it to IT and you could talk about the hot topic of the moment: Server Virtualisation, for example- reduce datacentre power use.
You’ll like this PDF that just provided me with the figure that my beloved patio heaters have generated 350000 tons of CO2 since their introduction 5 years ago…….