Chargers and Energy Star Rating
Even if people are not particularly into green issues, the credit crunch and rising energy costs will probably make them consider how much electricity they use.
There was a post on Nokia Conversations yesterday on Nokia’s new energy star rating system…
"indicates how much energy each charger uses when left plugged into the wall socket after charging is completed"
It’s well known that many electrical products left on standby consume a lot of electricity. Some diehards, turn all items totally off, including standby items. However, this is can be inconvenient, especially when things either take a long time to start up, loose their settings or don’t work at all (e.g. timed video recordings) when switched off.
About a year ago I purchased a energy meter that I could use to test the power consumption of any device. My strategy was to work out which items were consuming the most energy on standby and make an informed decision which items were worth switching off.
I found a few items that used a very large amount of power on standby - so much so these have either been replaced or are always turned off now. As an example, a cheap Panasonic TV used as much electricity on standby over a few years as the TV cost to buy! In the future, I can see people might more closely assess the power consumption of devices because a cheap device might actually be more expensive over time.
A found a Nokia charger not plugged into the phone but plugged into the mains costs nothing - or at least small enough to be zero in my Excel spreadsheet. As I use a lot of different phones for testing, I often have live chargers ready to connect to phones so this was good news. The same charger permanently plugged into the phone uses 9W and costs about the same as my desk lamp being on for 6 hrs a day - not relatively that much.
As an aside, I used to often leave my laser printer on 24hrs a day. This was costing me three times as much as a permanently charged phone. Using a cheap timer has allowed me to only keep the printer on during normal working hours with no inconvenience to me unless I am working especially early or late!
Going back the phone left charged, a phone permanently plugged in typically cycles between charging (9W), not charging (negligible) and charging (9W) again once the battery starts to be used. The question I have is why is the charger energy star rating so concerned about the negligible part (0.05W 5* and 0.5W 1* in the energy star chart) when most of the power used over a day is the 9W when the phone causes a charging cycle? Surely, it’s the 9W (charging) that’s significant?
Even if I have got something wrong somewhere, I can’t see how a poor charger energy 1* rating of 0.5W equates to much in a typical home. The average of the items I tested (excluding very high use ovens, kettles etc.) was approximately 25W and I would have thought the 0.5W phone charger would have been very low down on the list of items to consider.
Don’t get me wrong, I am not saying phone chargers shouldn’t be considered - every little helps, especially when large numbers of people can be persuaded to save energy. It’s just that the charger energy star rating seems to have a weird mode of measurement and people should be looking elsewhere if they want to save a significant amount of energy.
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