If i leave my charger plugged in and the switch is on without any device charging, does it ‘waste’ electricity? Why/why not?
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It used to be that some chargers wasted power that wasn’t going into charging a device, and it used to be with televisions that parts of the circuits that took time to “warm up” (including the cathode-ray tube) were kept on so that TVs would turn “instant on.”
With more modern switch-mode chargers, and LCD/LED TVs, this wasted power has been reduced dramatically. Government regulation has required these more efficient designs to be used, and the market has shifted from CRT-based TVs to flat-panel displays, so the amount of power “wasted” by plugged-in, but turned-off devices is now just a small percentage of the power in regular use.
Yet, we have billions of people on the planet, and multiplying the small power usage of individual devices by the number of people can be an impressively large number. However, compared to the many other kinds of losses in power distribution systems (resistance in power wires, fringing magnetic fields in high voltage lines, transformer conversion losses, etc.), it’s still a small percentage of the “wasted” or “lost” power.
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