Re: Bollocks: Call to scrap TV standby buttons to help environment

On Sat, 15 Apr 2006 08:21:42 +0100, a particular chimpanzee named
Norman Wells <norman@xxxxxxxxxxx> randomly hit the keyboard and
produced:

In article <e1pbqe0kll@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>, Cardinal Chunder <cchunder@fo
o.no.spam.xyzabcfghllaa.com> writes

When you think of the total waste of energy from devices in standby, it
is a wonder that nothing has been done sooner.

But this is totally wrong. No energy is wasted by having a device on
standby, it just goes into the room as heat. Since most rooms in most
buildings in most of Britain need heating most of the time, they act as
efficient little heaters. That means, if you like the temperature of
the room as it is, your fossil-fuelled heating system doesn't have to
work quite so hard, nor eat up quite as many fossils as it would
otherwise have to. So, leaving your electrical equipment on is, to use
the current jargon, carbon-neutral.

I think your logic may be equally wrong.

Not all of the heat gain is useful heat. Most is produced when it's
not needed, such as at night or during the summer. I don't know about
your house, but mine only needs heating for an average of 8 hours a
day for 6 months of the year.

Electrical equipment requires electricity (a leap of logic, I know,
but take my word for it), which emits more carbon in its production
and distribution than gas which is the usual fuel for domestic
heating, and is anything but efficient. Therefore 'heating' a house
with the waste heat from an appliance on standby will produce more CO2
than the equivalent heat from a modern efficient gas boiler. Not to
mention the difference in cost between an electric kWh and a gas kWh.
--
Hugo Nebula
"If no-one on the internet wants a piece of this,
just how far from the pack have you strayed?"
.

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