David Nebenzahl wrote:
On 6/1/2008 11:59 AM Rod Speed spake thus:

Bill wrote

The clock on my range has never kept correct time, yet it keeps
running and using electricity. (Small amount, but many little
things like this can add up.)

No they cant.

Yes, they can, and do.

Haven't you noticed that even the power companies themselves (like PG&E
here) are running ad campaigns advising people to get rid of all those
"phantom" electricity users?

A guy here at UC Berkeley has done research showing that all these
things--wall warts, devices that power LEDs, etc.--use a trememdous
amount of electricity when added up.


For sure, slow and steady always wins the race. In this case it is
waste. People tend to focus on big things but it is the small wasteful
or efficient things multiplied by hundreds of millions of users that
really ad up. Those cheepo wall wart power supplies waste power in two
ways. One is standby loss. Assume they loose a low 3W/each and you have
10. That is a waste of 22.32kwh/month per home just having them plugged
in and not even doing anything useful.

Then the cheepo power supplies are quite inefficient when powering a
load. I have read that the waste is collectively over 50 billion
kwh/year in the US.