If an unused phone charger left plugged in apparently costs me money as its using my electricity, how does this not apply to a socket outlet that has a built in USB.
In: 4
Technically, yes.
Though the amount is so minuscule that over a year it adds up to cents per charger.
With a lot of chargers, or if you’re trying to add up all the chargers everyone has plugged in it might be more of an issue, but a couple high quality chargers isn’t a huge amount of money over time. The question of “is it worth $1 a year to constantly plug and unplug this charger.” may be a question of personal convenience.
That socket outlet also consumes small amounts of power all the time. It’s made by a better company than the cheap wall plugs, so it wastes less, but not none.
Modern phone chargers use so little power that you’ll be able to keep them on for a year for pennies.
This is because only a few small components used to detect something connected need to be powered.
For a computer USB socket, the sending is done via the CPU or bridge which are always powered already so there’ll be no additional draw.
An unused phone charger uses between 0.1 and 0.5 Watts when plugged in and idling – usually the larger number when it’s got an indicator light.
This means that every hour it’s plugged in, you use 0.0005 kWh worth of energy, which you pay for.
Over a year (365 days, 24 hours) that’s about 1-4 kWh, which costs about 10-45c USD based on the national average price.
In my country, that’s up to R10 per year, not even enough to buy a can of coca cola.
Wall sockets with integrated usb ports use about the same.
A pair of USB outlets built into a double socket may consume in the region of 0.1W on standby. Over a year this adds up to about 1kWh, which from October would cost about 50p. Multiply that by how many pairs of USB outlets you have.
Here’s the thing: you can’t just “use up” energy. The energy has to go somewhere. In the case of a plugged-in phone charger, if electricity from your wall socket isn’t going into charging a battery, then the only other way that the charger could be drawing electricity is if that electricity is being turned into heat, which is wasted energy as far as you’re concerned. If there’s no charging and no heat, then no electricity is being used.
Which is why the following is a good rule of thumb (from [xkcd](https://what-if.xkcd.com/35/)):
>If an unused charger isn’t warm to the touch, it’s using less than a penny of electricity a day. For a small smartphone charger, if it’s not warm to the touch, it’s using less than a penny a **year**.
So in short, the amounts of wasted energy that we’re talking about are simply negligible.
It does for both, since they are the same thing.
However, in both case, the energy lost is minimal. Probably less than 1$ a year.
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