If i leave my charger plugged in and the switch is on without any device charging, does it ‘waste’ electricity? Why/why not?
In: 58
Yes, the most coming from LEDs, but also a fair amount coming from the ICs that drive the charger. This is for a few reasons.
One being that some of these ICs might use redumentary voltage dividers to bias a certain input to a specific voltage. You can look up what a voltage divider is, but the jist is that it brings a high voltage down to a lower voltage to be used somewhere else in the circuit.
Another reason so that these controllers will have bypass capacitors that filter out the higher frequency electrical noise from the power source. This will use power for the same reason above, its a passive device that isn’t turned off or on. Just providing clean power to the IC thats on ‘standby’ mode
The final reason is actually that ‘standby’ mode. Its usually rated at a few μA of current. This is due to the intrinsic nature of the MOS transistors in the IC, and how they’re implemented to build the chip. This is pretty not ELI5, but its as close as we can get given that each company has their own chip that works in its own specific way.
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