How to convince a family member to be energy conscious

jon81uk

Alnat1 said:

There are different points where money saving becomes too inconvenient for each of us. They make sense to us but not always to others.

My example, I'm happy to switch TV and set top box of at plug each night, might only save me £20-£30 a year. It takes a couple of seconds to do, seems no inconvenience to me but I won't give up my tumble dryer. Too much time and effort to hang out, fetch in and then have to iron the blinking lot. Clothes from the dryer don't need ironing and hubby tends to empty it and put all the clothes away, as I have trouble getting upstairs carrying the basket (bad ankle and need to hold rail).

In my head it all makes sense but most of you would consider me slightly crazy.

There is no way your TV and set top box is using £20-30 a year. Its more like 20-30pence.
TVs in standby are not allowed to use more than 0.5W by EU law. In reality they use a lot less.
As Which found here, a TV on standby for 19 hours used 0.22 Watts a day. Does tech on stand-by use lots of energy? – Which? Conversation
Its the TV when on that uses a lot of power.
0.22W a day over 365 days a year is about 1.5kWh I pay 27.84p per kWh, so thats about 40p a year.

Yes saving 40p a year is still possibly worth the effort of turning the TV on and off at the mains.

But I want to leave my set-top-box on as that records programmes. Turn it off at the mains and it won't record when I'm out. Separating out the plugs so I just turn the TV off isn't worth the effort.

Alnat1

Checked set top box and it uses 9.8w on standby, 19 hours a day, 365 days, 68kWh.

I make that £19.72 at 29p/kWh, will be £28.56 by Oct if 42p/kWh is the price.

I admit TV uses very little but the 2 switches are together so I click both.

k_man

jon81uk said:

Alnat1 said:

There are different points where money saving becomes too inconvenient for each of us. They make sense to us but not always to others.

My example, I'm happy to switch TV and set top box of at plug each night, might only save me £20-£30 a year. It takes a couple of seconds to do, seems no inconvenience to me but I won't give up my tumble dryer. Too much time and effort to hang out, fetch in and then have to iron the blinking lot. Clothes from the dryer don't need ironing and hubby tends to empty it and put all the clothes away, as I have trouble getting upstairs carrying the basket (bad ankle and need to hold rail).

In my head it all makes sense but most of you would consider me slightly crazy.

There is no way your TV and set top box is using £20-30 a year. Its more like 20-30pence.
TVs in standby are not allowed to use more than 0.5W by EU law. In reality they use a lot less.
As Which found here, a TV on standby for 19 hours used 0.22 Watts a day. Does tech on stand-by use lots of energy? – Which? Conversation
Its the TV when on that uses a lot of power.
0.22W a day over 365 days a year is about 1.5kWh I pay 27.84p per kWh, so thats about 40p a year.

Yes saving 40p a year is still possibly worth the effort of turning the TV on and off at the mains.

But I want to leave my set-top-box on as that records programmes. Turn it off at the mains and it won't record when I'm out. Separating out the plugs so I just turn the TV off isn't worth the effort.

Most set top boxes, especially those that can record, can use 10-20W. So an extra £20 - £30 extra cost by being left on 24/7 is very possible.

Whether turning them off is worthwhile is a different matter.

Norma41

GasPants said:

I have been switching things off at the socket when not in use (... goodbye Alexa). However, my husband insists on keeping his PC running all day (large PSU), probably 15 hours a day - approx 1.8kW per day. I've tried to explain that he is using between a 4th-5th of our daily electricity consumption - for no good reason. He is very resistant to changing his habits, although he has now enabled sleep mode and screen off timer. Any suggestions on how I get him to just switch the thing off?

Describe the bill and what percentage is made up by using 1.8kwh per day?

wittynamegoeshere

Alnat1 said:

Checked set top box and it uses 9.8w on standby, 19 hours a day, 365 days, 68kWh.

I make that £19.72 at 29p/kWh, will be £28.56 by Oct if 42p/kWh is the price.

I admit TV uses very little but the 2 switches are together so I click both.

That confirms my general rule of thumb, that 1W = £2 per year.  It was £1 per year about a year ago but sadly those days are gone.

It will be approaching £3 per year per watt from the autumn, so vampire devices will become even more important to eliminate.

Our TV stays on standby, we're not eco-obsessives.  But there's an advantage to that, you can switch it on from the sofa.  But I can't see any advantage in leaving my desk switched on, and it actually runs better if you restart once a day.

Alnat1

Finally made the effort to check how much the router uses, 7.1w. I'm happy with the cost p.a. of it being on 24/7 as the solar/battery monitoring and CCTV system use it.

poppellerant

If he pays the bills, then so what? If you pay the bills, then 15w at standby is hardly going to break the bank.  A walloping 10p/day or £3/month, assuming it's sat on standby 24 hours a day.  So during, the night for 8 hours, it's probably 1/3 of the figures I've just worked out for you.

If it bothers you that much and you pay the bill, ask for £3 every month.  He'll probably be more tickled by your audacity.

My own computer is running 24/7, as it's better for the hardware to not be power cycled all the time.  Parts such as capacitors and hard drives are under the most stress when being powered on and my data is valuable to me.

If and when I move my storage drive to an SSD drive, I might re-evaluate how I do things.  But until large SSD drives become cheap enough, my data will always have a home on spinning rust.

poppellerant

wittynamegoeshere said:

I'm pretty sure the power cycle theory is an insignificantly tiny risk.  My PCs have all been switched on and off at the wall for years, they've never gone bang.

I can't speak for everyone, but my other half and I don't have our own money, it's all ours.  So if I was spending money on something I'd expect to justify it and would understand if she wanted to know more about it or had other ideas.

If you need massive amounts of data then an SSD for the system and a HD for storage is the normal method.  You can then also enable power saving on the HD, so it will stop spinning unless you're actually accessing it.

I used to turn my systems on an off a very long time ago.  But I won't forget the feeling of losing my data drive one morning, when it didn't spin up.  So as tiny as the risk might be, it's not a risk I am willing to take again.  This includes stopping the drives spinning down, to save a couple of watts.  It simply is not worth the risk.

I used to have two hard drives in my computer, so having a drive for the system and programs and another drive for my storage isn't unfamiliar to me.  In fact I still have two separate drives now - one is an SSD for Windows and programs, the other is a hard drive for my files.

I appreciate that you had good intentions when posting.  But believe me, experience has taught me the best way of doing things.

Hexane

jon81uk said:

Alnat1 said:

There are different points where money saving becomes too inconvenient for each of us. They make sense to us but not always to others.

My example, I'm happy to switch TV and set top box of at plug each night, might only save me £20-£30 a year. It takes a couple of seconds to do, seems no inconvenience to me but I won't give up my tumble dryer. Too much time and effort to hang out, fetch in and then have to iron the blinking lot. Clothes from the dryer don't need ironing and hubby tends to empty it and put all the clothes away, as I have trouble getting upstairs carrying the basket (bad ankle and need to hold rail).

In my head it all makes sense but most of you would consider me slightly crazy.

As Which found here, a TV on standby for 19 hours used 0.22 Watts a day. Does tech on stand-by use lots of energy? – Which? Conversation

That's not what that article says.

0.22W a day over 365 days a year is about 1.5kWh 

It may be, but that's not what the article says, so you need to correct that and re-calculate.

Coffeekup

jon81uk said:.

There is no way your TV and set top box is using £20-30 a year. Its more like 20-30pence.

A sky tv box uses 25w just in standby, if it's recording it's higher