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 also depends on how the device is built. It should waste less than a 1W, as mentioned already.
However, I like to unplug all the chargers and adaptors and whatnot when not using them. They’re budget chinese appliances and I like to think that I am minimizing fire hazard by unplugging them.
There is some electronics still active in it. But, it’s so little it’s neglible, both from a cost perspective and from an environmental perspective.
The environmentalists love showing big numbers of how much power is wasted, but remember, any number multiplied by a huge number of units will be a big number. It is still nothing compared to just about everything else in your house using power. The little power it uses is still not wasted, as it will become heat, which cuts down your heating a neglible amount instead.
Not really a detailed explanation but a very good test. If the charger gets warm at all when no device is charging the electronics are using an older design and it’s wasting electricity (turns into heat you can feel). If you can’t feel any warming at all it’s using a more modern electronic design and is wasting very little electricity.
I feel like none of these are answering the question so I’m going to take a try.
If you imagine a charger as a person being awake and when it’s charging something he/she is talking to someone else, you could imagine it takes a lot of energy to talk to that other person. But how do you know if the other person is there? You need to stay awake, you need to let others know that you’re available, etc. There’s a lot going on to be idle. But even when you’re alone, there’s a voice in your head having a small conversation, transferring power (in our analogy). It transfers a lot less than when you’re talking with someone else but it’s still there and it’s always there. An adaptor works in kind of a similar way, no matter how perfectly we design it, there’s always going to be something to sense if something else is plugged in, and or there’s going to be leakage in imperfect parts.
By leaving your charger plugged in, you reduce its lifetime. As every electric appliance, it will not last forever, and the cost of the charger is much more than the idle electricity it uses.
PS: I will not repeat what other said about electricity.
No. It’s pennies. Not worth the hassle. You waste more energy when you open the fridge door.
Buy a kill-a-watt and see for yourself.
Yes, but the waste is pretty minimal. Chargers need to convert the 120V AC voltage of the wall into a 5V DC power your phone actually uses. This conversion requires transformers which consists of a wire going from the hot prong, wrapping/coiling around a magnetic core, then going back out to the neutral prong. There’s a similar setup on the device side with fewer windings on the same core. I’m going to avoid the technicalities of how a transformer steps down the voltage to keep things simple, but I can go into more detail if people are interested.
Since there’s a complete connection between the hot and neutral prongs, electricity can flow through the device. Now there’s no real resistance with this setup without something plugged in on the other side, so it draws very little power until something is plugged in. We’re talking less than a dollar per year.
A lot of comments here try to define the “waste” aspect of the question. For this purpose any energy used to not fulfill the devices primary function is wasted energy.
In chargers there are small buckets of magnetism. The magnetism is created by using electricity. But every bucket is not perfect – it has holes, so magnetism is leaking.
Additionally, there are other components used to keep filling the buckets that aren’t perfect either.
Buckets = coils.
For a more nuanced answer; the electricity is actually isn’t “wasted” if the temperature outside is couldn’t than inside. The energy becomes heat in a 1:1 ratio.
Now if it is hotter outside than inside and A/C is cooling the house, the charger and the A/C are in a fight. For every unit of heat the charger wastes the more the A/C has to counteract.
So in the winter time I see no problem, but at summer it can add up. Especially if you have a lot of devices in stand-by.
Yes but by such a small amount that it doesn’t matter unless you have dozens of things plugged in and even then do you want to unplug 80 things before bed to save 50 cents?
Short answer, your charger converts AC power to DC power and even if nothing is plugged into it, that conversion will draw a little something. It’s not much, though.
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