How Much Power Do Electronic Equipment Consume When in Standby Mode?

Negligible Consumption

In this category we are listing the equipment that are consuming something from the power grid, but below 0.5 W, meaning that they have no visible impact on your electricity bill. Of course if you are paranoid on savings you can remove all of them from the wall – but if you are really paranoid you are probably already removing every piece of electronic device from the wall anyway.

Like we said before this is just a sample and of course you may have equipment from the categories below that consume different power levels when in standby mode, if they are from a different brand or are a different model. That is why we are specifying the brand and model.

The equipment that had negligible consumption when in standby mode were the following:

• LCD monitor (Samsung SyncMaster 932BW, 19”widescreen): 0.1 W (LED turned off) or 0.2 W (LED blinking)
• Microwave oven (Sanyo EM-S5002W): 0.2 W
• Generic battery charger with no batteries installed: 0.4 W

When thought that with the computer turned off and with the blue LED from our monitor blinking the monitor would be consuming an expressive value, but that was not the case. But if you press the power button to turn off the blinking LED the power is cut in a half, going from 0.2 W to 0.1 W.

The consumption of the microwave oven clock is negligible, so you can leave it attached to the wall.

The highest consumption in this category was from the battery charger. As mentioned before we added the battery charger with no batteries installed because a lot of people have the habit of leaving the charger always installed to an AC outlet. Also notice the difference between this generic charger and the charger from Sony listed in the previous page, which consumed nothing. The higher consumption of this charger was probably due to its two bright LEDs that were turned on all the time.