In misc.consumers.frugal-living dpb wrote:

All true but it's still hard to believe the "average house" over 75% in
standby, even for electronics. Maybe I have a hard time thinking that
because I'm sure my house is far below average in numbers of these
devices so I suspect my estimate of "average" is skewed as compared to
the sample mean.

Yeah, I find that a little hard to believe too, but I only have
one TV in my house. So, I'm probably not "average" either in that
regard. In my kitchen the only things that use any standby power
are the stove, microwave, and coffee maker. The coffee maker has
a couple of LEDs that stay on, pointlessly, all the time but it
certainly uses more energy making a pot of coffee in the morning
than those LEDs use the other 23.5 hours of the day. The same
goes for the microwave and stove clocks. The microwave has a
clock display that I disable mostly because I don't need 4 clocks
in my kitchen, but I'm sure the clock circuit is still running and
it just doesn't display the time. The stove and coffee maker both
have clocks which can't be disabled, but again, any one of those
use more energy in daily usage than the standby uses the entire
rest of the time, by a wide margin.

Bill Ranck
Blacksburg, Va.