Energy efficiency = more cash 2 you. Or so the old advert said.
BBC News recently had an article about the ’standby’ button prevalent on many consumer electronics - TVs, hi-fis - and the effect it’s having on energy consumption across the UK. Slashdot, that bastion of great journalism, picked up the story and it got over 700 comments, way above average. Now I couldn’t be bothered reading any of these, but I think that suggests it was a bit of a hot topic. And so it is a hot topic here. The needless waste of energy has always been a bugbear of mine.
Whether it’s an office full of brightly-lit CRT monitors merrily displaying login screens to each other all night and all weekend, or a nation of TVs left on ’standby’ mode - apparently using two-thirds of full power in some cases - it’s just annoying. The government is rightly trying to encourage people to cut down on their energy consumption, not least because they don’t really want to build any more of those nasty, loss-making nuclear power stations. Manufacturers are getting better at cutting ’standby’ energy consumption - but there’s a fly in the energy-saving ointment.
As you will be aware if you read my Luddite rantings, analogue television is going to be turned off in 2010 or so, replaced with its digital cousin, Freeview and digital satellite. In the same government committee meeting as some clever blokey said that “digital TV represents nothing of benefit whatsoever”, it also transpired that “the impact on the UK’s electricity consumption from forcing people to buy set-top boxes for every TV and analogue video recorder in their house is significant”. To the tune of £7 of electricity per set-top box per year, in fact.
Let me introduce BSkyB, who require every customer to keep their digital set-top box switched on 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, as a condition of their continued subscription. The idea is that Sky may want to squirt a software update down the line once in a blue moon, and the box had better be around to receive it. Let me also introduce Panasonic, whose set-top boxes consume 18 watts on full power - and 17 watts on standby*. I’m sure Panasonic aren’t the only ones with similarly pointless ’standby’ modes for their digital TV equipment.
Not that you can sensibly not use Standby mode on a lot of these devices, anyway. Guess what happens if you disobey the almighty Sky and switch your digibox off at the wall? You have to wait over 30 seconds for it to reboot itself when it comes back on. If you switch a Freeview box off? It forgets what channels it can receive. A Kenwood hi-fi? It comes back on in its flashy in-store ‘demo’ mode. Great.
Hope Tony’s getting those nuclear power stations ready!
* These figures are from memory of reading the tech sheet in the back of the manual, but each is no more than 5 watts out. And the two figures are very, very close.
