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Comment by actually_a_dog | Hacker News Reader

20 watts standby is only about 14.7 kWh per month. Even at on-peak, summer PG&E rates, we're only talking about $7/month. Granted, I'd much rather pay $0 than $7, and I'd rather not waste energy, but we're probably not talking about anything close to the amount of energy the average household wastes. I'd be looking at refrigerators and other large appliances for energy savings long before I'd be thinking about how much electricity the TV uses on standby.

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That's 20W and $84/yr to do absolutely nothing. There is absolutely, positively no reason the standby power draw needs to be that high. I'm fine with like, 100-1000mW to allow whatever background circuity is required to wake up, but 20W is absurd. That's enough to reasonably illuminate a bedroom (your average 100W-equivalent LED bulb is 14-20W).

$7/month is a really high amount. Especially for nothing. Or something I actively don’t want.

I have lots of dumb devices in my house I don’t want piling on $7 so the manufacturer can try to earn $0.30/month in data fees. I have multiple TVs, a washer, a dryer, a fridge, a cryo tank, lots of things. I don’t want them to waste $7 each.

cryo tank?

A tank you go in and cry every evening after work.

Probably a cold immersion tub.

Are you seriously trying to suggest that paying $7/mo for literally nothing is a reasonable thing to do? Not to mention the waste this causes...

Sure, other appliances may suck down more power, but at least you are getting something valuable for that energy use and expense.

I am not. I am suggesting there are other savings in the average household energy budget that are more significant. Besides, even "waste" electricity heats a home in the winter, so it's not quite as bad as it sounds even.

And it heats it when you want it cool in the summer. So it’s actually net worse?

Unless you have a crazy old bad refrigerator that TV would be up there with the most costly appliance per month for most people. WHILE BEING OFF.

You are off your rocker here

I would argue the TV is the most wasteful thing you mentioned. The refrigerator, even if it is inefficient, still does it’s job by cooling food. That ~15kWh monthly to your TV to exist in an off state does nothing for your quality of life. It’s not like the energy is uses somehow charged the TV for future use, it’s just running internal systems that we have no insight into and most likely does not benefit us.

$7/mo would be something like 1/5 of my electricity bill and we run 2x old overclocked fx-8350s, (w/ dual monitors) and do all cooking at home.

That’s a lot for something functionally off.

So, about US$100 a year?

Doesn't that seem like a pretty crap deal if you're planning on using the TV for 5+ years or so?

Say you keep the TV for 7 years, that's $588. You can get a 75 inch Sony Bravia TV for $1500. You want to pay 1/3 of the price of your TV just to power it while it is turned off?

Exactly this. More than 7$ a month leave my bank account every month on so many random things, subscriptions I forget to cancel, virtual machines I forget to destroy etc etc. I'd rather have my TV shutdown / turn on quickly over sweating about a random $7 savings on an electric bill that I wouldn't even see anyway.

you don't need to be put into a financial crunch by the $7 in order to see it as wasteful, and it doesn't take 20W of energy to get a television to do things quickly.

we're in this sorry state of affairs because of people accepting lower quality without protest, while expecting everything to be cheap. Companies are in a bad spot, and so are consumers.

Demand doesn't really drive supply, not the way we're told it does. The manufacturers want to make devices that give them a further income stream, and they just have a marketing budget for making sure demand doesn't drop too low for what they're making.

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