I saw an article at The Register about Energy Buster .
I must say at first reading it seemed like a fantastic idea to be able to terminate all the stuff around the house which is on standby, but the more I thought about it, it seemed to me that we would need quite a few of them to deal with all the appliances littering our house from microwaves to computers. Then I had a brainwave. We have switches on the power points! We can turn them off WITHOUT A REMOTE CONTROL. I think I am going to patent the idea.
Yeah, , but do you go round switching things off though?
The are basically what we have for out lights in the sitting room lighting circuit), though cheaper from Eurobatteries.com. Quite a decnet range on the remotes though, you could probably turn everything off in your house in one go from the sitting toom 🙂 but yeah, for the average standby device, doesn’t seem worth it moneywise. and how much embedded energy is involved in making these things and shipping them fromChina etc.?
I think all the fuss about things on standby isn’t really goign to make much difference really. I thnk it’s over egging the pudding about how much of a differnce it makes (Oh, must remember to turn all the standby things off when we fly off to Teneriffe), and people just aren’t going to bother on the whole for a lot of things anyway. THe answer really is for things to be deisgned to just use a couple of watts on standby.
I do think that we are being conned. While we are all busy separating out our cans and bottles from our green waste and fretting about our microwave’s power consumption while we are not using it, we will feel that something is being done, and won’t look more seriously at the absence of any real action, in areas which hit the bottom lines of big businesses.