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Haha...I usually charge my iPhone and MacBook Air at work! Of course I work at a power company and our cost for power is much less than the residential rate.
 
Because this is what I worry about when I am dropping hundreds of dollars on a product...

Right, because owning something that costs hundreds of dollars means I wouldn't prefer my electricity costs be lower. I must be a crazy environmentalist if I like paying less for something.

I like paying more unnecessarily. It shows off how rich I am.
 
What is the cost of leaving the charger plugged in when not charging?

I was wondering that, thinking that the power consumption used while charging would be dwarfed by the power used by always leaving the charger pugged in, but then I read this old page and found out that that was peanuts too.

Now how much money am I wasting by leaving my phone plugged in overnight when it only takes an hour to charge? :rolleyes:

Not much extra I guess, doesn't it cycle on and off to save the battery, or is that just the bigger devices?
 
Why is this about iphones? Any smartphone would use that kind of energy.

Because if the report was regarding the energy use of the LG GW620R no one would be bothered to read it.

Know your audience.
 
Really that cheap? I would have thought more than that a week. Im in the UK though, so im not sure how much a difference elec bills would be.

Currently pay around £1000 a year here.

Yeah, I was surprised it's that cheap as well.

Probably comparable rates. I pay about 8 cents USD per kWh before taxes and whatnot.
 
I was wondering that, thinking that the power consumption used while charging would be dwarfed by the power used by always leaving the charger plugged in, but then I read this old page and found out that that was peanuts too.

Thanks! Great reference.
 
Extremely ... extremely minuscule. Hook it up to a Kill-A-Watt sometime. Basically, the electrical cost of a cellphone or a Macbook Air for an entire year is less than 1 visit to Starbucks. Now, x millions of cellphone users adds up but still... My 800 watt gaming computer makes me a terrible person. <cough>

Check out: http://standby.lbl.gov/summary-table.html

Looks like .26 watts? lawl

That's average, max. is 1 Watt

Does not seem like much but even .26 W adds up

.26 X 24 X 365 = 2277,6 Watts

100 million X 2277,6 = 228 GWatt

So, even 0.26 watt is a waste if 10s or 100s of millions of iPhones would leave their chargers plugged in.
 
Unless you use the airport charger, then it's $3 for 30 minutes.

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Does not seem like much but even .26 W adds up

.26 X 24 X 365 = 2277,6 Watts

Up to this point it equals 26.8 cents by their reckoning, then wow, would you believe it, multiply anything by 100 million and you get a bit number.

This would be relevant if they were talking about the environment but the article is about cost.

If they had measured it in trees/drowning polar bears/bunnies with:(faces you're absolutely right.
 
I can't get over the fact that it cost almost as much to power your xbox than your flat screen.

But that's also assuming running it all day won't kill it. :D

(I have an xbox - it's a joke)
 
It's quite shocking to think how much a set-top box consumes, more than a Desktop PC, while a set-top box does nothing other than a few limited tasks every once in a while when you decide to use it, as opposed to a PC that does everything you'd ever want to do.

It's not just the power consumption of useful high-tech devices we should worry about, but also about useless, badly designed devices that just suck energy non-stop to power their RAM because the manufacturer wasn't capable of spending more on actual permanent storage, or because the device constantly executes a loop of functions just to check if there is any input from the remote.

Oh, for those who say that we should be unplugging every electronic device when we don't use them (TV, set top box, washing machine, etc…), well give it a try yourself: first thing that will happen is that they will forget the time, the channels, they will take 10 minutes to boot up when you turn them back on, and if you turn them on in the wrong order they won't recognize each other (set top boxes in particular).
 
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