Community/SoapBox

I have a Comacast digital cable box and measured same amount of power consumption (~35watts) whether it’s on or off!!  I used the Kill-A-Watt device to measure.  I couldnt’ believe it!

How much power do these idling devices use as a percent of total electrical energy consumed?

Cable boxes are notorious for drawing an absurd amount of power whether “on” or “off.” Theres room for improvement there.

But the vast majority of components use less than a few watts when idling, and only to keep the power supply topped off and the remote circuit running. I suspect that if you did a comparison of idle power consumed by electronics to total power expended over the same period of time, it will be miniscule. Did you know that running your oven for an hour to cook dinner could use A WHOPPING 2000 WATT*HOURS????? (Thats sarcasm , by the way).

Well, you need to decide what’s more important to you.  Using the tiny amount of power that most electronics use to be on standby to receive commands from a remote control or turn on with a timer.  Or saving a tiny amount of money and have nothing that can be activated automatically or by remote control or signal and just have AC power switches on everything.  Then maybe I won’t have to worry about buying a 40 dollar meter to tell me that my DVD player consumes 4 watts while off which I would have spent more on that stupid meter that would equal more than the money I would have spent from leaving the DVD player plugged in.  Another priceless yet useless article from no one other than Electronic House.

Interesting.  I’ll still keep my convenience.  It’s well worth the extra 75 cents a year.

Electricity is cheap and global warming is a scam for redistribution of wealth and control over our lives.

Unless you need to run an air-conditioner to keep your home cool, then this is pointless: the energy used by these appliances is not ‘wasted’ it warms up your house for you, cutting down on your other heating bills, watt for watt.

This is little more than an advert for this expensive little device - if you want to know how much energy something is using you just need to place your hand above it - if there is heat it is ‘wasting’ energy, if it is cool then no electrictiy is being used. Simple and FREE !

> Electricity is cheap and global warming is a scam
> for redistribution of wealth and control over our
> lives.

Considering the war in Iraq is about oil, energy in general is not cheap - unless you consider the lost lives to be of little value.

Global warming denial is a scam for redistribution of wealth to big oil and coal companies. The most profitable company in human history is Exxon Mobile. Let’s give them some more.

“Do not destroy oil wells.”

GWB on the eve of the invasion

On a side note, global warming isn’t a scam as far as the temperature HAS increased very slowly over the past couple of years. The question is whether humans are causing this or if it is part of a natural cycle. There really is no way to answer this, because we only started taking accurate temperature measurements around the start of the industrial revolution. There are ways to gauge what the temperature was thousands of years ago, but they’re not accurate enough to prove whether the last 150 years of global warming was caused by humans or not.

In short, is the planet getting warmer? Yes. Is this a bad thing? I don’t know. Is it caused by humans? I don’t know. Is it caused by the blinking light on your idling LCD tv? Definitely not.

Fred, here’s the scam in “global warming/climate change"…

The climate change alarmists want the US to enter into an agreement to cut back CO2 emissions to some incredibly low level, which will cost billions and billions of dollars to realize, if it’s even possible at all. Carbon credits will be bought and sold on the CO2 market as part of this scam, with some people making lots of money off this trading. Someone’s getting rich as a side-effect of “Global Warming”, but not you or me (Al Gore perhaps?).

The dirty secret that no one’s talking about is, these CO2 emissions reductions will have a basically imperceptible effect on “global warming”. That’s right, billions upon billions of dollars wasted (money out of your pocket through higher taxes and increased pricess of energy and other products/services) with no real results, other than making some “Global Warming” insiders rich.

Now that’s a scam!

Well said, Mark.  +1

Very useful information, thanks. Add to that, I should mention the radiation from the electronics -when they’re in “standby” - still goes on and the risk of cancer also goes on.