New Energy Efficiency Standards Take Effect This Week In the US (nrdc.org) 297
AmiMoJo writes: Eagerly awaited national energy efficiency standards for the little black boxes on the cords that connect many of our electronics--such as smartphones, computer laptops and electric toothbrushes--to wall outlets take effect this week. Known as external power supplies, or the less elegant term 'wall warts,' these power adapters may be small, but they consume a lot of energy. With 5 to 10 external power supplies in the average U.S. household, the new efficiency standards are projected to save consumers $300 million a year in electricity costs and reduce the carbon pollution that fuels dangerous climate change. The U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) projects that the new standards for external power supplies alone will cut nearly 47 million metric tons of carbon dioxide over 30 years, equivalent to the annual electricity use of 6.5 million homes.
Home DC (Score:3)
I never got why we never bothered making additional DC sockets for our homes, Where we wouldn't need these power bricks for every "Low Power" device.
I guess you could in theory have a power socket that allows USB too.
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I guess you could in theory have a power socket that allows USB too.
They do exist. [homedepot.com]
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They are horribly inefficient, when will the government step in and fix this issue!? /sarcasm...
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Some designs have spring-loaded doors wired to a switch, so they're only on when you plug something in.
SHOCKING! (Score:2)
geeze, now I'm going to have to go home and see how hard it is to cram a micro USB in a power strip outlet.
At least you should be sort of safe with a full-size USB connector. Unless you're five years old, really drunk or both.
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...because there is no standard voltage across all those devices. Heck, even the polarity (+ and -) is not universal.
Pick up 5 different devices (you ADSL modem, settop box, the speakers on your desk, the charger for your razor, your cordless phone base station, your security cam, et cetera et cetera) and you will find they all have different voltages. I've seen 5 volt, 7.5 volt, 9 volt, 12 volt, even 4.5 or 18 sometimes (the amperages don't matter in this case). As long as that is not fixed, a DC bus is po
Re: Home DC (Score:4, Insightful)
Say you run a 5V circuit to the other end of your house with 20m of cable. To run small device with a 10W load, even with fat 12AWG copper wiring you get almost a 10% loss due to voltage drop. It would be cheaper to use even a bad wall wart than to suffer those kinds of losses and pay for all that copper.
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So until we have low voltage superconducting busbars that are so cheap that they can be in every building "Home DC" is not going to be efficient.
Thanks to rapid graphene science progress that time may not be that far away.
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$1 per person (Score:2)
So a savings of $300 million a year, divided among ~325 million people comes out to a little less than $1 per year. That's inconsequential. The pollution savings are significant, but too abstract for the common person to understand. Knowing the American people, I doubt that anyone cares; am I being too cynical?
Either way, it's a worthy change, and I hope to see more like this.
Re:$1 per person (Score:4, Insightful)
So a savings of $300 million a year, divided among ~325 million people comes out to a little less than $1 per year. That's inconsequential.
But what about the costs of the initiative? How much more do the devices cost consumers? I suspect that there's really no savings and that the higher cost of the devices offset any potential savings.
Re:$1 per person - math is weird (Score:3)
I came up with the same $1. But they also said it's the equivalent of 6.5M homes - which is 5% of homes (~125M households in the us). I find it hard to believe that the average annual electric bill is $50 ($20/pp x 2.5ppl/household). Something in that summary is screwy.
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save consumers $300 million a year in electricity (Score:5, Insightful)
...save consumers $300 million a year in electricity costs...
So $1/year/person. In other words, no savings to speak of.
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Shoot I thought they meant $300 million per consumer a year... you know because my power bill is outrageous.
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So $1/year/person. In other words, no savings to speak of.
You can always count on the amateur capitalist to neglect to fully prorate the costs of a thing before proclaiming its worth. Of course, if it were a proposed $1/year/person tax they'd be howling as if you'd stolen their first-born.
A dollar here, a dollar there (Score:5, Insightful)
(source [energy.gov])(pdf). Sure, the wall wart is small potatoes. Lots of these items are small bits individually, and they all have to pass a cost/benefit test (the cost of the incremental improvement must be less than the financial savings). When you add up all the bits and bobs, the cumulative impact is significant. It's not like DOE started with wall warts. It focused initially on the biggest opportunities, and works its way down the list. It's only because /.ers have lots more wall warts than the common man that it's even newsworthy for us.
Re:save consumers $300 million a year in electrici (Score:4, Insightful)
Well, if this is $300 net, I'll take it. That's how economics works, doesn't it? You stop investing when the marginal return for a dollar spent is a dollar.
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That's just the saving on the supply of electricity. How much is preventing more than 1.5m tonnes of CO2/year being emitted, plus the other pollution, worth?
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George: I didn't get any bread.
Jerry: Just forget it. Let it go.
George: Excuse me, I think you forgot my bread.
Soup Nazi: Bread, two thousand dollars extra.
George: Two thousand dollars? But everybody in front of me got free bread!
Soup Nazi: You want bread?
George: Yes, please.
Soup Nazi: THREE thousand dollars!
Free market (Score:5, Funny)
Why bother, when this problem could be resolved by the free market. I mean, who'd want to buy a power supply that constantly drains power even when it's off? This would only make sense if you assume the average consumer is an idiot.
Re:Free market (Score:4, Insightful)
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Because people don't buy power supplies. They buy a phone. Or an answering matchine. Or a router. Or a Roku. Or a printer. They don't care about the wall wart that powers the thing.
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I hope you're trying to be funny. The free market has spoken. Cheap Chinese crap that burns so much power it may set your house on fire is the device of choice for the unwashed masses.
Market failure (Score:3)
Why bother, when this problem could be resolved by the free market.
The "free market" has utterly failed to solve this problem to date. QED your faith in the free market to solve all problems is misplaced.
I mean, who'd want to buy a power supply that constantly drains power even when it's off?
No one but you are implying that there is a choice. Many of these power supplies are designed to be as cheap as possible and/or badly designed. If I buy a TiVo or a router it's not as if I have a choice of what power supply it comes with. Companies that sell these things do not care AT ALL about your home or office electricity budget because they have no financial or r
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To put the $300 million/yr figure in context, the U.S. uses about $470 billion worth of electricity in a year. So the savings from the new standard amounts to less than a 0.1% reduction in electricity c
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5 to 10? (Score:2)
5 to 10 external power supplies in the average U.S. household
That means somewhere in the U.S., there are about 20 wart-free houses that are offsetting my house. I recently hauled a cardboard box filled with them to the recycler; they were just the old ones from dead electronics. And I didn't even toss all of them; I kept another full box as replacements.
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Radio noise (Score:2)
I just wish there were a similar national effort towards reducing the amount of electrical noise these things generate. They're regulated on paper, but not in practice, and the noise they create, once it is radiated by the power cords and general house wiring, is a major source of shortwave radio interference.
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Stray radio emissions are wasted electricity, so increased efficiency should indirectly result in less emissions, right?
funny (Score:2)
"$300 million a year in electricity costs and reduce the carbon pollution that fuels dangerous climate change. The U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) projects that the new standards for external power supplies alone will cut nearly 47 million metric tons of carbon dioxide over 30 years, equivalent to the annual electricity use of 6.5 million homes." OR
1 day in the life of almost any industrial plant, that can profit from the carbon trading market.
Not saying it should be a one OR the other tradeoff but why doe
300 million a year... (Score:2)
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Does nothing to replace guzzlers in use, eh? (Score:2)
Unless this new standard has a provision to require manufacturers to recall and replace all the hundreds of millions of wart guzzlers already in the field, this won't be very newsworthy for at least a decade. Are citizens expected to run out and spend more money to replace the inefficient ones originally sold to them by manufacturers for decades? Why not make the manufacturers culpable for the consequences of their greed? They already knew how to make them more efficient, but didn't bother to do so to bo
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$300M a year!!! (Score:2)
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It's only $1/year after you spend $200 replacing every power supply in your house.
The ROI on that is.... interesting.
Example of the Principal-Agent Problem (Score:5, Insightful)
This is an example of the very common "Principal-Agent Problem" which exists in some form in many, many commercial products and services. Manufacturers and service providers make decisions in effect for consumer that benefit their bottom line, but pass on all sorts of costs to consumers as a result.
In this case cheap energy-wasteful wall-warts that reduce the manufacturer cost but adds to everyone's electricity bill. Market competition does not address this issue since purveyors of electronics are not using "wall-wart power efficiency" in their sales campaigns, or even reveal how much power they waste if the consumer wants to find out (you have to buy it and see).
Only regulation by an organization that acts in the interests of the consumer can address this.
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A link to the Wikipedia page on this "Principal-Agent Problem" [wikipedia.org].
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"Market competition does not address this issue since purveyors of electronics are not using "wall-wart power efficiency" in their sales campaigns"
Don't confuse "does not address" with "cannot address". It does not address the issue -now- because the issue is trivial. People don't care about a few dozen watts being wasted as heat - especially in winter time.
Why not tackle the carbon output at the source? (Score:3)
We could demand by government fiat that wall warts be more efficient and reduce our carbon output or we could use nuclear power and eliminate it. I suggest we use nuclear power.
If we use technology like a waste annihilating molten salt reactor we could eliminate the carbon emitted from electricity production, burn up the nuclear waste from old solid fuel reactors, and get some very valuable medical and industrial isotopes.
The only reason we haven't seen reactors like this already is because the federal government has decided that they alone have the authority to manage nuclear materials, and that the people that license these nuclear facilities are so risk adverse that they'd rather see everyone in the world suffer and die from a carbon dioxide induced environmental collapse than have someone get on the news for having bumped their head while working on something "nukular".
The federal government created this problem, I have little faith that they will fix it.
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1) Nuclear power is stupidly expensive and environmentally dubious.
2) Improving efficiency would reduce power requirements, which not only would reduce the size and quantity of power plants required (regardless of type) but also improves economics in other ways.
3) Quite frankly, given the potential for abuse, environmental damage and public health hazards posed by nuclear power, government regulation is really the ONLY solution that would have sufficient clout and impartiality to be even remotely effective.
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1) Nuclear power is stupidly expensive
Only because the government has deemed it so. If the government would actually do its job and issue licenses for nuclear power plants then it might not be so expensive. I seem to recall the federal government holding up licensing a nuclear power plant for thirty years, always coming back looking for more paperwork. At this point the paperwork likely weighs more than the power plant. It's not like we haven't built power plants before, there's a hundred of them in the USA right now. The government just n
new ruler: a presidential "little black dress" (Score:3)
When the U.S. president says "millions of dollars" you just know he's not discussing foreign policy. He probably shouldn't be allowed to wield that word at all.
Sorry, Mr President, "billions" is as low as you're allowed to go for dollars; you'll have to save that for talking about "ounces"—even if "this grand initiative will save America $0.3 billion annually" doesn't make it sound like we're paying off the last war any time soon.
Come to think of it, if the president was confined to "trillions" (for the sake of uniformity) that wouldn't be a bad thing, either—even if the average America loses count when first hearing "this grand initiative will save America $0.0003 trillion annually." Obama in eight years has presided over something like $30 trillion in total state expenditure. For his substantive purposes, trillions are a perfectly good unit every day of the week, and all speechifying occasions.
it gets old (Score:2)
"reduce the carbon pollution that fuels dangerous climate change"
stop preaching. i reject your planet worshiping death cult.
Looking forward. (Score:3)
I look forward to personally saving $300M next year in electricity. Oh, you meant totally? Well, you are only saving me a buck, less than a penny every three days.
Like other climate solutions, I expect this to cause more climate harm than it is meant to mitigate.
Re:idiots (Score:5, Insightful)
So, you're basically saying that we should dedicate a human to manually do a job that a chip could do trivially. Great.
I, for one, would like my electronics to do their charging quickly, efficiently, and without my having to babysit them.
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This. What the GP calls government intervention, the rest of us call convenience.
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Cheap manufacturers that don't give consumers a choice are another part
Ahh, but you fail to realize "cheap" is the choice of consumers, not the manufacturers. Manufacturers are just responding to the demand.
Re:idiots (Score:4, Insightful)
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So true. A couple of years ago, I bought a wattmeter and measured pretty much everything. The result was incredible : while my LCD screen would switch from ~30 to 0.05 watts when in standby (with the LED yellow), my USB external drive would only go from 14 to 9 Watts ... when the power button was on "0".
Yes, a physical switch that makes you believe that the power is completely off (no noise no light) was actually only controlling the standby state of the drive, leaking 9 watts when powered off ! That shou
Pointless busy work (Score:2)
But why do what we all should do, and instead add in Government controls on what we can can and cannot do, simply because we're too lazy to do what we ought to do.
You are asserting we all "should" waste our time monitoring badly designed electronic vampire devices and I think your premise is flawed. I have better things to do with my time. Has nothing to do with laziness AND it rewards companies for designing inefficient products. The correct solution is to ensure that the products are power efficient in the first place and make the problem go away without placing a huge collective burden on the citizenry with pointless busywork.
Fixing market failures is a good use of government (Score:5, Insightful)
More government intervention, because consumers ARE STUPID. Plug all your stupid wall warts into a power strip, when you get done charging, turn off the power strip. Idiots...now another stupid regulation.
So I should waste my time monitoring devices that were designed poorly in the first place? THAT is stupid. If we need a regulation to get companies to design products that aren't needlessly wasteful then so be it. Fixing market failures [wikipedia.org] is actually a good use of government.
Re: Fixing market failures is a good use of govern (Score:3, Insightful)
hrm ... normally a Wikipedia fan in the economics section, but this is a little too simplistic.
Market failures are typcially held to be scenarios where the market cannot achieve a solution - not ones where Pareto efficiency hasn't [yet] been achieved.
Interestingly enough, many regulators cite market failure where regulations prevent market solutions from being offered. e.g. Nuclear energy insurance. Beware of their circular reasoning.
Personally when I buy computer PSU's I look for 85+ Bronze or whatever r
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The only device I use regularly* that needs batteries is the TV remote. And that goes for years betwix replacements.
* - I have a cell phone, but don't use it. It is for emergencies, like a couple of quarters in my pocket used to be.
Re:idiots (Score:5, Insightful)
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That's all fine and good, but that does nothing to address the poor efficiency of these devices while they're actually in use.
But even so, the allowances for unused supplies is pretty generous and easily achievable with a few cents worth of components. It's just that now the market has an incentive (avoiding regulatory fines) to actually give a shit about not burning the candle from both ends, and consumers will see a benefit regardless if they knew about what they were missing or not.
=Smidge=
Re: idiots (Score:2)
The broken window fallacy made real.
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And what is the window being broken in this situation? What is being destroyed?
=Smidge=
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I think you are confused. The broken-window fallacy exposes the flawed reasoning behind the notion that waste benefits the economy by creating work. Arguing in support of wasteful, inefficient electronic devices (and not the opposite) would be an example of such a fallacy.
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Then perhaps a better solution is something like an energy star rating so that consumers can be informed of how much electricity your product will waste.
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What an idiotic comment. So I should have to turn off and turn on every device I own twice? And I can't use a remote to turn anything on anymore? And what about the efficiency while I'm using the device?
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Great. Any advice for dealing with devices that are never done charging? Off the top of my head for stuff in my own home:
- Multiple USB hubs
- Multiple hard drives
- Home security camera
- Printer
All of those are always-on and use wall warts to draw power. I'm confident I could double that list (at least) if I did a walkthrough of my home. Your suggestion does nothing to address always-on devices, which, arguably, are the larger concern here. Regulations that require better efficiency do address always-on devi
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The two immediate problems are that 1) they're not hooked up to a machine with an ATX PSU (it's an old Mac mini for most of those, in fact), and 2) I wouldn't want any of those devices to be semi-permanently wired into the computer to which they're attached. Besides which, while that may be advice I can apply when doing a build for a new machine, it's not something that will work for the average consumer.
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Plug all your stupid wall warts into a power strip, when you get done charging, turn off the power strip.
Is this correct? Last year, we had rolling blackout in San Antonio (might have been 2 years ago). The power company told us that we had to unplug the device to actually save energy. They stated that plugged in is always draining power regardless if it's on our off.
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Your solution is a poor one, ill-conceived, inefficient, and poorly directed. Pollution comes from the power generator, and the power generating company should be taxed at a rate equal to the demonstrable damage the pollution causes. This should give electric companies more incentive to tell their customers not to waste.
Of course, if the utility is state-owned, this nice mechanism disappears; the state is not going to tax itself for polluting or for any other misbehavior. Another reason to minimize governme
Re:Ghost electric vampires finally dealt with (Score:5, Funny)
And its supposed to record all your shows while you're not home switched off and unplugged right? Most all stbs today have an auto off set by default if its not set you can set it up yourself.
I know a guy who plugs his phone in at night then turns the powerstrip off its pluged into to save energy.
Then he wonders why his phone isn't charged in the morning.
Lets not do that.
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So, obviously you don't like him enough to tell him. :-P
Cruel, but funny.
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The cable box doesn't really have a means to understand when it is not in use unless you tell it. Your computer interprets lack of activity while your cable box just thinks you are enjoying the programming if anything.
Perhaps there should be a sleep button that can be enabled by the user. I know several televisions i have had do have settings to turn the TV off at predetermined time intervals so I can goto sleep while watching it.
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Actually, according to the documents packaged with the Roku 3, that particular device does understand to go to sleep when not in use, which is why it has no power switch. The upstream HDMI load, lack thereof, or possibly some HDMI signal negotiations appears to be sufficient to let it know. Plus there's an intermediate timeout/screensaver mode.
Disclaimer: the Roku can stay warm enough that a cynic might interpret lack of a power switch as a beancounter's justification for skimping on a 25-cent part, but the
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The cable box can't tell when your tv is on.
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One would think that the cable box could do the same.
It could.... are you willing to pay $20 more a month on the rental for each cable box, to cover the extra research and development + silicon and software costs?
The development and assurance of additional efficiency can slow down development and does not come without a price.
In the PC world.... this was dealt with a long time ago. Perhaps you should just use a PC supporting ACPI and Netflix as your cable box, then you don't need to do listing
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And its supposed to record all your shows while you're not home switched off and unplugged right? Most all stbs today have an auto off set by default if its not set you can set it up yourself.
The last time I put a power meter on a set top box, the difference in power between "On", and "standby" was negligible. They were huge power hogs, even when "off".
Of course you can't just switch off the power bar or unplug them. In addition to missing any recordings, they can take a long time after a power cycle to be ready, if they re-download the programming guide, etc.
Re:Ghost electric vampires finally dealt with (Score:4, Insightful)
Saves $300 million a year.
So... about a dollar each.
Re: Ghost electric vampires finally dealt with (Score:2, Insightful)
Don't worry - prices will raise $2 each and the carbon output caused by the economic activity increase required to cover the additional cost will overshadow the savings from the mandate.
Everything is easy if we only look at first-order effects!
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Don't worry - prices will raise $2 each
So positive ROI is achieved in about 24 months. Sounds good.
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So it only takes two years of savings to make back the one-off increase of the unit price. And I can't imagine that there would be any frantic economic activity required to absorb a couple of dollars.
Re: Ghost electric vampires finally dealt with (Score:3)
The math in the summary ($300million savings, equal to 6.5 million homes) seems to indicate the average home's yearly electrical cost is less than $50 .
I can has one of these?
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There are a LOT of words, and some punctuation, between the clauses "$300 million a year in electricity costs" and "6.5 million homes."
Those words probably mean something...
=Smidge=
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cut nearly 47 million metric tons of carbon dioxide over 30 years, equivalent to the annual electricity use of 6.5 million homes.
I assume they mean the pollution created by 6.5 million home in a year is how much this new regulation will cut in 30 years.
It would have probably been better to say "The power saving will each year it will cut carbon dioxide emissions by close to the same amount created by over 200k homes."
You'll Never Know if a Device is Compliant (Score:3)
Go out to Amazon and start looking closely at adapters, chargers and lights. A shocking number of items have obviously fake Under Writers Laboratory marks. Outside well known US and Major Asian Brands (Sony, Sharp, Panasonic, Samsung, LG) I'm dubious that the devices will be compliant.
Re: Ghost electric vampires finally dealt with (Score:2)
Re:Ghost electric vampires finally dealt with (Score:4, Insightful)
LOL, oh yeah ... who built them? What's that you say, Capitalists who didn't give a damn about anything but their bottom line?
Companies make 'em and sell 'em, chances are the average consumer isn't even aware of the issue ... and your "market" doesn't give a damn, because it's built on the idea of short term benefit.
Sorry, but I refuse to believe corporations would do this without some external impetus. Assuming rational consumers making good choices based on perfect information? Yeah, the unicorns really work there.
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LOL, oh yeah ... who built them? What's that you say, Capitalists who didn't give a damn about anything but their bottom line?
Companies make 'em and sell 'em, chances are the average consumer isn't even aware of the issue ... and your "market" doesn't give a damn, because it's built on the idea of short term benefit.
Sorry, but I refuse to believe corporations would do this without some external impetus. Assuming rational consumers making good choices based on perfect information? Yeah, the unicorns really work there.
I think this is a BS problem. Cellphones need 5volts. To have 5v, and have isolation, you need a step-down transformer and a switching dc converter power chip or a potentially more dangerous direct connect switching power source alone.
If you opt for the dollar store power charger, these use a switching dc supply converter, often, one side (wire) of these devices is directly connected to the power line, These latter devices are very efficient, matching on-time to cell phone battery demand. To be safe, the
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This was paid for in a 400 million dollar study performed on behalf of the manufacturers of the new wall warts.
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They prefer to be called beauty marks...
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It will also cost approximately 40 billion to replace all the wall warts.
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So the cost of the study is recouped in only 15 months? Sounds like money well spent in that case.
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I doubt even the $300 million figure is true.
I can't remember the last charger type device that I've seen drain any measurable power when not in use.
I ran a kill-a-watt behind my surge protector. The surge protector had the following:
Nintendo DS charger, Nintendo DSi charger. Nintendo DS Lite charger. Proprietary cell phone charger. Mini USB charger. Micro USB charger.
After a week, these alleged "vampire" devices had consumed a flat fucking 0.00 kWh. The idea that we need to do something about these "
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I'm pretty sure it goes back to the 90s
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Are you joking? The term has been around at least a decade, if not more, and really is a common term.
They usually block adjacent plugs and have no regard for the space usually allocated for a plug, so you end up wasting outlet space because some idiot decided it didn't matter how big of a footprint the power supply has.
For pretty much any form of portable consumer electronics I've decided if it can't charge from standard USB I'm not having it. But for things like cordless phones, or rechargeable vacuums,
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Probably mostly just help put low cost MFG out of business
Since when is the cost spread changed by changing the standards?
Low cost MFG ARE the big guys.
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We believe in nothing, Lebowski. Nothing. And tomorrow we come back and we cut off your chonson.