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

In article <1he0mem.1q87xsx3f2kgcN%me4@xxxxxxxxxxx>, Wayne Stuart
<me4@xxxxxxxxxxx> writes
Norman Wells <norman@xxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

In article <e23ht801noe@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>, Cardinal Chunder <cc@xxxxxxx
spam.xyzabcfghllaa.com> writes

<snip>
Whether government legislate or not, it's still worth trying to save
energy in the home if for no other reason than having more money to spend.

Well, that's everyone's personal choice. Not everyone will agree with
you that it's worth all the hassle of turning the TV off every night for
a year just to save the price of a pint.

I've got a power monitor gadget, and I thought you all might be
interested to hear what sort of power the various things in my house use
that could run permanently or on standby.

So adding that up, if I don't shut any of these things when I'm not
using them, my house is permanently using at least 89 watts. [1] That's
2.1 kilowatt hour per day, 780 kilowatt hour per year...

Assuming 20 million households in our country were to do similar, that
would be 15.6 terawatt hour of electricity needing to be generated every
year, for no appreciable purpose.

No, it wouldn't. It's 0.0156 terawatt hours.

That's the trouble with maths. It's just too complicated for some
people.

Or in money terms, I'd guess that's
about 1.25 billion pounds per year. [2] And that's not even including
business premises.

It costs you just under £55 a year to keep all of your equipment running
on standby 24 hours a day, or just over £1 per week. Do you really want
to go round switching off 16 devices every night and whenever you're not
using them, resetting and waiting for them every time you turn them back
on, and replacing those that blow under all the repeated strain to save
£1 per week?

The fact that you appear to keep them permanently on would indicate that
you're not. In that case, I suggest you're in the sensible majority.

In any case, as I've pointed out, most of the heat emitted by electrical
devices is not wasted, but serves to keep your house just that little
bit warmer so the heating doesn't have to work quite so hard and use
quite so much fossil fuel.

If I go to bed leaving my living room at about 20 degrees with no
electrical appliances running, and the outside temperature drops to
about 5 degrees, that room is still at about 17 degrees when I get up in
the morning, so only about a fifth of the internal/external temperature
difference has been lost to the environment. This indicates that about
80% of the energy consumed by your devices on standby overnight is
usefully employed as supplementary heating.

The cost of keeping all your electrical equipment on for eight hours
overnight, which is the major time when you won't be using it, is
something like £18 per year. The wasted electricity which escapes
through the windows etc and serves no heating purpose is just one fifth
of that, ie £3.60 per year, or just about a penny a day. Go round
turning your 16 pieces of equipment off every night to save that if you
wish, but please don't try to convince me it's worthwhile or will save
the planet.

[2] - How much does a kwh of electricity cost nowadays?

About 7p.

--
Norman Wells
.