Bye-Bye Standby

A little device that came free when we bought our first house has been a surprise hit in providing a truly non-intrusive and transparent way of eliminating wasted standby energy.

Shortly after moving in late last year, a box arrived with cleaning products, tea bags, loo roll and lots of advertising – courtesy of our estate agent of course. Buried in the bottom was a ‘TV-Standby eliminator’, provided by E.ON Energy which is designed to cut power to a TV as an alternative option to leaving it on standby.

So how does it work?

The unit is plugged directly into the wall socket, and has two plug sockets available to use – one is a socket that switches off completely after it detects the TV is no longer turned on, eliminating any wasted power from standby. The second is effectively on all the time, as if it were just the wall socket itself which can be used for other appliances you don’t want switched off completely.

But how does it know when I want it back on?

The clever bit is the connected infra-red detector which picks up your TV remote control signal and recognises when you are trying to turn the TV back on and restores power to the socket.

What’s the big deal?

I think it’s a great example of a simple piece of technology that allows energy consumption to be reduced with minimal consumer intervention.

Whilst the quantities of energy involved are not huge, across many households in aggregate this wasted energy is not insignificant and has been estimated at £740m of electricity a year!

Once we got around to installing it, we plugged a 4-way strip socket into the controllable socket and connected our TV, Sky-box and even a lamp to the socket. The only difference we now notice is that switching the TV on takes two presses of the remote control; (one to switch on the power socket, one to turn the TV on) (Ed – this is due to our TV always starting in ‘standby’ mode – if your TV switches on fully when you turn it off and on at the wall you would only need to press once!)

When we’re done with TV, one press on the remote puts it into standby. Then 20 seconds later, the lamp, Sky-box and TV all power down completely. Simples.

Is it really worth it?

Although I’m impressed with the simplicity of the TV-Standby eliminator, I was curious actually how much energy it saves. So let’s take a look using some simple assumptions…

Hours on Stand-By	7300 per year	Assuming around 4 hours watching per day
TV Standby Consumption	around 1W	Very modern TV’s might improve on this a little
Average Electricity Cost	11 pence per kWh	Based on our standard tariff
Power wasted on standby (TV only)	7.3 kW per year	(= 7300 x 1/1000)
Cost of Wasted Energy (TV Only)	£0.80 per year	(= 7.3 x 11)
Other appliances standby consumption	13 – 20W	Modern PVRs and HD set-top boxes can be hungry!
Power wasted  by peripherals	146kW per year	(= 7300 x 20/1000)
Cost per year of wasted energy (TV + peripherals)	£16.06	(= 146 x 11)

Assuming that the ‘standby-eliminator can reduce standby-time to a negligible amount of time per year, the savings for a TV alone stack up to around 7W. Hmmm, so about £1 per year – I know it’s a time for austerity but that’s not going to break the bank.

However, once you consider other peripherals can consume in the region of 13 – 20W on standby (like that HD Set-top box of yours) the savings slowly start to stack up – with a 20W device also powered down by the standby-eliminator, savings jump to around £16 a year.

Although we got ours free, the devices themselves cost only in the region of £10-£15, such as these from Energy Monitors Direct or NoMoreStandby, making the payback less than a year.

Consider also that the cost of electricity is likely to increase significantly over the medium term, making the savings still more attractive.

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