Saturday 27 April 2013

Standby: the energy that no-one uses

On average UK households spends between £50 - £90 a year each powering appliances left in standby mode or not in use. This is the energy used by certain appliances when they are not in use and not switched off at the plug. That’s quite a lot of money to spend powering your microwaves clock display!

As well as standby power, other new additions to the average household’s collection of electrical goods such as broadband modems, broadband routers, digi-boxes and cordless telephones remain using low levels of electricity when not being used. These are not items that we tend to think to turn off, but can gradually go on to consume a great deal of electricity over the year. For instance a broadband modem router can consume as much as £9 worth of electricity if left on for an entire year.
Fortunately there are a number of Energy Saving Trust Recommended products available to help cut down your standby electricity consumption, such as standby savers that allow you to easily turn all of your appliances off from standby without having to reach for the plug.

Recent regulations specify that all electronic products sold within the EU after 2010 cannot have a standby power greater than 1W, which means we won’t have to worry as much in future about the standby consumption of our products. However, whilst the average standby consumption of new products is going down, households are being filled with more and more electronic gadgets, so it is still worth looking at your standby energy usage throughout your home.

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