Hi,

I have an electronic charger that came with my sony erricson phone. It doesn't create any heat when it is charging or not. I do unplug it when it is not charging, but do I need to? And if I do not need to, then should we all push to use this type of charger for the more forgetful among us?

Jake

The trivial amount of heat my Nokia cell charger generates is welcomed 7 months of the year. It's hardly wasted.

As usual with tips and suggestions, your mileage may vary. Some people living in Texas sure could use less heat while some in Siberia, I'm sure, are welcoming it.

The general point, though, is that the aggregate of all these little devices that never completely turn off and/or don't have evry efficient AC/CD converters (DVD players, stereos, TVs, wall chargers, etc) add up to quite a huge amount of power. It's already significant for most households, but when you consider a whole country, it's a lot of waste.

Still, you can unplug it 5 months of the year, no?

thanks for the tip. i never knew this

Actually, the slow draw of energy has nothing to do with heat, it's just using energy to do nothing. It's slight, but it's plugged in 24/7, so it adds up.

I had a simple answer. I set up a 'charging station' by the front door. I plugged all our chargers into a single power strip, and when nothing needs to be charged, I just turn the strip off. Plus, all our cel phones, PDA and other items are now parked in one area so we know where to look when we're rushing out the door.

Exactly how much electricity is used?

I have seen a cell phone charger that my friend plugged into my room catch on fire, so that is the main reason I do not leave them plugged in. It did not engulf in flames on the outside, but it was smoking pretty good and it eventually failed. The ones that come with phones always seem pretty cheap and I just do not trust them anymore due to them burning up, breaking for overheating, or just the general waste of electricity they cause. I use them just when I need them.

Geek,

I guess it depends.. One household, one day. Probably not much. One house over a year, it probably adds up. A whole country full of "phantom loads" that drain up juice for no reason, that's a huge inefficiency.

while you're at it, put all your stereo & tv stuff on a power strip and turn that off when not in use. the energy savings from that alone was noticeable on my electric bill.

Basically most devices in modern houses contain a transformer that lowers the voltage to 12 volts DC, with the exception of electrical motors in food processors.

If a house was equipped with a large central transformer and two separate power grids (one distributing 220 volts AC and the other distributing 12 volts DC) we would have much better efficiency.

Imagine this for an entire country - the difference would be huge!

Another issue is that transformers use quite a lot of metal. Producing this metal is harmful for the environment as well. So less transformers is better (you don't need them if you have a 12v DC power grid, you would just need a power regulator and at most a stabilizer as well).

Skaag

MGR, I agree but it's a little hard to convince others to unplug when you say it saves but don't actually have any hard facts when sometimes that’s all they want to hear. Common sense would tell you to always unplug anything not regularly used but without actual numbers to back it up just makes a tougher topic to sway non-treehuggers.

Geek,

True enough. I've seen researches that mentioned what % of all electricity used in the US was wasted by inefficient DC transformers and phantom loads, but the exact reference and figures don't come to mind right now. I'm pretty sure you could find them in google, and if I do find anything I'll probably write something about it here.

Right now, time for bed, though.

All very well meaning, but we need to tackle the REAL energy use in the house, things that have become essential to modern Western society, as in bathing in hot water every day, washing our clothes every time we wear them and then drying them with electricity, eating hot food, running airconditioners.
These are HUGE devourers of energy and if Treehuggers want to carry on doing this (as most of you do)then get used to high energy use and get used to pumping out CO2.

I actualy asked a google answers question about this a while ago and the responders seemed to agree that the power use is negligible ...

http://answers.google.com/answers/threadview?id=545048

Chris,

You are right, but we can walk and chew gum at the same time (expression meaning we can do more than one thing at once). We here at TH try to talk about the large scale and small scale. It's all interconnected.

TrueDis,

It depends on what your criteria for "negligible" is.

"The answer IS simple: yes it consumes power when not powering a device (no load). However, it is
negligible in regards to any actual cost you would incur on an electric bill."

Yes, I think we would all agree that a cellphone charger or laptop would be negligible "in regards to any actual *cost*". But we are not talking about device here but many, and we are not talking only about cost, but energy.

It will vary from home to home depending on how many phantom loads you have, but if you aggregate it to the city, state or country level, it's a huge amount of wasted energy in absolute terms.

So it depends on what angle you take.

But thanks for posting the link, it was interesting.

FWIW, following this post I went and hooked up my "Kill-A-Watt" monitor to my cell phone charger. The results are in: 0.04 kWh over 308 hours. That is, I left the charger plugged in for 308 hours, and attached my phone whenever it got low.

At that rate my total kWh for the year is going to be 1.1

I understand that there are a lot of "bad" adapters out there, but maybe they are the big, heavy, hot things attached to cheap computer equipment. I saved an 8 watt continuous pull by dropping my powered computer speakers, for instance.

Bottom line - the Kill-A-Watt tells the story.

okay, so it's "only" 1.1 kwH per year. that's for one charger for one cell phone.

let's extrapolate: the population of canada is 32 million. sure, not everyone has a cell phone, but there are a LOT of ppl with two, three, or more of the things. if everybody wastes "only" 1.1 kwh per year, do the math:

32.3 MILLION kilowatt hours wasted per year!

and the states is even bigger!

i just did the math:

one barrel of oil = 1640.8KWh

therefore, if 32 million cell phone charger adapters were left plugged in and wasting 1.1 KWh/year, that's

196,977.08

barrels of oil wasted!