Do you keep your tech on standby?

Here we go again!

The EST report is welcome, but the EST themselves have admitted in a letter to me several years ago that their testing only looks at the products which are currently on the market, and incudes no products not currently on sale. They also admitted, in the same letter, that they only test products which manufacturers OFFER for testing, so the range of items tested is bound to be very skewed by this.

There’s potential good and bad aspects to these admissions – firstly it would suggest that rarrar’s concern is unfounded – they should not be making headlines from older items … but note I said it would SUGGEST this … I am unconvinced and think rarrar may have a valid point. Secondly the fact that only products offered for testing are considered implies that if manufacturers want to get good PR they will only put forward the most energy effcient items they make and conveniently omit to ffer the power guzzlers. Whether this really happens I don’t know, but if it does then actually the truth could well be that far more power is wasted than the report states.

However, the big issue here is not domestic users. Its businesses. Whilst leaving your charger plugged in (a major fire risk as highlighted by every fire brigade in the country) may not use much power and may not register on yoru domestic energy bill, an office block or school or university with monitors in standby mode, PC’s ‘asleep’ rathen that unplugged, ‘phone chargers left in lots of rooms, etc., uses a phenomenal amount of power that is wasted. My current employment is in one of the largest universities in the north of England and we carried out an experiemnt last year where the facilities staff were instruicted to pull out the plugs of every appliance in every room of just one building on their evening security rounds. Nothing was exempted unless it had a warning notice signed by a Dean of Faculty attached to it. This experiment was conducted over a 3 month period which included the Christmas Vacation. A total of over £800,000 was saved on teh energy bill compared to the same 3 month period the year before and over £1m was saved compared to the same period the year after … showing that waste is on the increase not the decrease.

Imagine how much money we would save if every room in the entire university was subject to mandatory unplugging all year round?

Similarly I just can’t understand how pubs and clubs are allowed to have outdoor heaters switched on all day and all night long, even during closed hours, and yet as I walk the 3.5 mile sto work every morning I pass at the very least 17 different pubs and clubs whith these heaters buring at 07:00, clearly been on all night, and mostly there are more than a dozen heaters at each premises. Quite apart form the ciminal wate opf energy, is there any wonder that pubs are closing due to lack of profitability when they are paying for all that wasted electricity?

Whether domestic or commercial. the issue is twofold – downright laziness on the part of users and lunacy in the manufacturing process for including standby features in any appliance at all. Standby settings should be banned by law.

Although showing how much power can be saved by shutting down is a good exercise , I agree with Clint that the savings quoted could not come from PCs and IT equipment alone.
My calcs would suggest that it would take switching off around 70,000 PC+monitor units powered up at 100 watts each to achieve those savings of £800k if closed down for an extra 15 hours.

In hibernate mode my PC + LCD monitor takes 2 watts, sleep mode 3 watts , switched on ~60watts.

In general while pulling out plugs is a good way of monitoring power use, on a large scale this can result in increased faults, cable failures and bad backs whose cost in an organisation can be much higher than the £1 per year saving per PC taken from hibernate to power off.

There is another Which conversation about the use of science to support claims, I think the EST report is a good example of how many reports , claims and ads do not add up scientifically or statistically.