By Al Gordon
Help Desk
June 24, 2008 11:04 am Who knew? It turns out one of the "greenest" tools for your consumer electronics is an old-fashioned power strip, while remote controls are serious energy hogs. A comprehensive study for the Consumer Electronics Association using 2006 data put the number at 11 percent of residential electricity and 7.3 percent of total residential energy consumption. Given the trade association financing of the report, prudence dictated checking another source. The CEA data is consistent with a study for the U.S. Department of Energy by two scientists at Berkeley National Laboratory that found consumer electronics accounted for 10 percent of the nation's residential electricity use in 1999. Both studies concluded that TVs were at the top of the list with personal computers a close second. By way of comparison, that share of energy consumption is comparable to that for appliances or lighting. Two points leap out from the CEA study: First, consumer electronics' share of the nation's energy demand is going up sharply because Americans are opting for high-consumption devices: ever-wider-screen TVs, more powerful computers, and the game console explosion. Second, according to the study, nearly a third of consumer electronics' energy consumption takes place when devices are not in use. A quarter of the electricity, in fact, is used when the equipment ostensibly is "off." How could that be? Very simple. In order for your TV, stereo or whatever to turn itself on when you hit the device's remote control "on" button, the unit has to be running in a standby mode so that the remote's receiver can respond to the signal. If it were totally shut off, the remote would be trying to communicate with a dead device. The federal EnergyStar® energy efficiency program has led to decreases in consumption for new units. But those gains have been swallowed up by the sheer growth of the consumer electronics market. Plus, not all devices have EnergyStar standards — cable boxes, for example. Nor is there any readily available data archive to check on a device's energy consumption. So when I replaced my old conventional TV with an HD LCD and swapped out the old digital cable box for the HD version, there is no immediate way to tell whether I increased or decreased my energy consumption. We tend to assume that new equipment has to be more efficient than old, but per the CEA study, that may not necessarily be the case. When you shut down a computer, it does shut down entirely. However, with modern operating systems that let Macs and PCs run stably for long stretches of time, many users — I confess, I was one of them — prefer to put their units into "sleep" mode, which essentially creates the same kind of lower, but still consuming state as a remote-ready TV. Furthermore, computers have wide varieties of peripherals attached, which consume energy as well. My home computer is an iMac, so in theory I start off with one less component since my monitor and CPU are in the same box. Minimal help. Among other things attached to my computer are powered speakers, a TV tuner unit, a "multifunction" (printer/scanner/fax/photo card reader) device, a couple of external hard drives, a label printer, and a USB hub. All of these have those ubiquitous power bricks connected to them. One simply needs to reach over and feel the heat coming off the bricks to know that even when the devices are idle they are consuming power. As oil prices soar and the cost of energy becomes a major drag on the U.S. economy as well as our pocketbooks, the consumer electronics industry will have to be more responsive. Energy ratings should be posted on computer and entertainment goods the same way they are on refrigerators. Designs should be more efficient. "Off" should really mean off. Do we really need to have a different "brick" for each piece of equipment when a common power source might consume less energy? Cable boxes are particularly notorious because shutting them down wipes out much of their data, requiring a reset when turned back on. But there is a simple step we can all take now to reduce our consumer electronics energy footprint: turn stuff off. It was an age-old argument in consumer electronics as to whether the longevity of a device was reduced by repeated off and on cycles. The truth is that most of today's gizmos are hopelessly obsolete long before they fail, so this debate is pointless. Just shut the thing down. That's where power strips help: Instead of having to turn off or unplug (because so many units lack off switches) multiple devices, I plug mine into a power strip and turn them off with a single flick of a switch. It isn't a perfect solution. But in the much-quoted words of the Chinese philosopher Lao-tzu: A journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step. nnn Al Gordon is a Massachusetts-based writer who specializes in technology and consumer electronics. You can read more of his articles at www.algordon.com/techblog.html and e-mail him at eagle@algordon.com.
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