Treehugger Homework: Unplug Your Cellphone Charger

If you have a cellphone, have you ever noticed that your charger stays warm even when you are not charging your phone with it? That's because it is still draining electricity. "According to Future Forests, only 5% of the power drawn by cell phone chargers are actually used to charge phones. The other 95% is wasted when you leave it plugged into the wall, but not into your phone. The lesson? Unplug your charger when you are not using it [or plug everything on a power strip and use the switch to turn it off instead of manually plugging and unplugging things. -TH]. If you don’t, it’s just wasting your money and adding to the pollution created by burning fossil fuels." We're fairly certain that there are no major engineering challenges that keep charger-makers from building in a feature that keeps the charger from using electricity when not in use; it's probably just cost-cutting. Of course, this advice about cellphones applies to everything that uses a vampire-like "wall wart" charger that doesn't turn off and keeps sucking juice for no reason. Via ::Shea Gunther's Blog