Standby Saver System???

Cardew

noncom wrote: »

Much as I (generally) admire Cardew's scepticism:

I bought a (quite expensive at £25) Standby Saver strip for our TV setup.

Obviously the PVR cannot be powered off entirely, as it needs to wake up for recordings. We discovered the TV can't either, as it takes so long to wake up again it confuses the Harmony Remote. So both of those remain powered all the time. However, the strip provides two Permanently On sockets for this purpose.

You may ask what benefit that has over plugging them into another socket on the wall, and the answer is that the strip also contains a degree of surge protection.

So, plugged into the strip and having their power completely removed when we press off on the remote: Audio Amplifier, Powered Sub Woofer, Wii, DVD player, Network Media Player.

The last three consume almost trivial amounts of power on standby, but the first two do not: Audio Amplifier takes almost 5W to keep it warm according to the manual, and the Powered Sub a whopping 15W.

Supposing that we're only watching TV etc for 4 hours a day (actually much less than this usually), thats 20hrs per day of 20W saved.

So 400Wh per day * 365 days = 146kWh per year

Even at Cardew's benchmark 8p to 9p per unit for electricity (and I can assure him I pay a lot more for that, as I use a genuinely green supplier, and I suspect few people actually pay that little), the saver strip will pay for itself in a couple of years.

Whoaa!!!

The discussion was about the cost of a remote device to switch off a mobile phone charger.

Also I stated that 1 watt left on 24/7 is 8.76kWh a year which I said was 'under a pound' that allows the cost to be 11.41p per unit(kWh)

I would totally agree that for a load of 20 watts it is obviously worthwhile; not to mention that it is sometimes difficult to get at the sockets to switch off manually.

If you are quoting cost given in earlier posts in this thread, you might have missed that they were from 2007 and 2008 when the benchmark was 8p to 9p a kWh.

noncom_2

Apologies, sir. I didn't notice the dates on the other posts, and hadn't done the maths to work out from your more recent post what unit rate you were allowing for. But even 11.4p's a heck of a lot cheaper than I pay...... ;-)

From my point of view, inaccessibility is not really the issue. I could very easily power the whole TV system from a simple extension lead under the stand, with its power switch reachable. But the rest of the family would still forget to switch it off.

The beauty of the SaverStrip is that they don't have to do anything different from usual - if they press the Off button on the remote, everything goes into standby, and then a few seconds later, everything that can have its power cut switches off completely.

tonsai

I just checked out how much Britsish gas charge per KwH and it currently says:

12.03p per Kwh.

So these Standby Saver gadgets really could make a saving. In my lounge I have:
- TV
- DVD
- Video
- Virgin Box
- PVR
- Surround Sound
- Wii
- Aerial Booster


I need to check out how much these all use on standby. The problem I have is the plug to turn them all off is out of site behind the cabinet. This Savasocket sounds like a good option as you can use the remote to cut the power to all the other devices. I need to work out though how much money it would save. Does anyone know if there is some device I can buy which measures how much electricity they use when in standby.

zeupater

tonsai wrote: »

I just checked out how much Britsish gas charge per KwH and it currently says:

12.03p per Kwh.

So these Standby Saver gadgets really could make a saving. In my lounge I have:
- TV
- DVD
- Video
- Virgin Box
- PVR
- Surround Sound
- Wii
- Aerial Booster


I need to check out how much these all use on standby. The problem I have is the plug to turn them all off is out of site behind the cabinet. This Savasocket sounds like a good option as you can use the remote to cut the power to all the other devices. I need to work out though how much money it would save. Does anyone know if there is some device I can buy which measures how much electricity they use when in standby.

Hi

For an accurate reading per device/socket get one of these .... http://www.philex.com/catalogue/product/?id=481&cat=1046 ... as they're pretty good and provide all of the information you'll need, and more. It'll cost somewhere between £5 & £20 depending on whether you can find someone with them on offer at the time.

The alternative would be a whole house monitor such as the OWL, but they're not really accurate enough to measure the difference on small loads.

HTH
Z

penrhyn

I'd be surprised if the total power consumed by your list on standby would be more than 60 watts. So about 1.2 Kwh per 24 hours on standby.

King_Nothing

I leave everything on standby, the inconvenience of switching them on/off outweighs the meager costs.

thenudeone

King_Nothing wrote: »

I leave everything on standby, the inconvenience of switching them on/off outweighs the meager costs.

Planet - destroyer!!!!!!

King_Nothing

Damn right.

tonsai

penrhyn wrote: »

I'd be surprised if the total power consumed by your list on standby would be more than 60 watts. So about 1.2 Kwh per 24 hours on standby.

ok, so 1.2 * 360 * £0.12 = £51.84.

So could save me around £50 a year. Maybe more, maybe less.

zeupater

penrhyn wrote: »

I'd be surprised if the total power consumed by your list on standby would be more than 60 watts. So about 1.2 Kwh per 24 hours on standby.

So, for an average 3300kWh/year household somewhere in the region of 13% of the total energy consumption for the devices on standby in the lounge alone .....

HTH
Z