We Love... Energy Efficient Housemates?

Tristan and Jason saw an advert on television during the holiday. Apparently, it said "leaving your television on standby will use as much energy as an entire evening's viewing". So they thought 'Crap! We're burning money!', and have taken to turning it off.

While I see their point that wasting money is bad, it is a lot more convenient to press the power button on the remote. And modern life is all about convenience isn't it. In other words, sitting down and realising I've got to stand up again, is pissing me off.

But anyway, I digress. While I am impressed by my flatmates' desire to protect the environment, it occurred to me that what they didn't take into account is that the advert missed out how long you have to leave the television on standby for in order to run up the bill by the same amount as an evenings viewing.

So first, lets work out the power consumption of an evening. Lets say the time frame for our entire evening's television viewing is the Google average of 3 hours and 44 minutes. That'll do, it sounds reasonable. Now, my television, in viewing mode, consumes 90W. That means that an evening's viewing is about 0.336kW/h, and works out at approximately £0.027.

When in standby mode, my television uses about 1.4W. And so, by my calculations, my television would have to be on standby for exactly 240 hours to counteract that. Hell, if we left the television on standby for 365 days straight, we'd run up an electricity bill of £0.99. Split four ways, that's almost a whopping 25p a year. Including VAT. Well spank my arse and call me Judy, that's a saving. I spend more on stamps in a month paying the bills for this house...

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