Unplug your recharger and save a polar bear

While it's a real cute idea for the phone manufacturers to blame the consumer for leaving their chargers plugged in, is it not about time the chargers were made more efficient in the first place?

We're all aware of the reduction in wasted heat energy produced by fluorescent lamps and solid-state lighting compared to their energy-guzzling incandescent ancestors; the same should be true for phone chargers by utilising switched-mode power supplies to reduce electrical energy lost as heat (ever noticed how hot some phone chargers can get when in use?) and by not consuming power (no matter how minimal) when the phone is unplugged.

There may be an increased cost in R&D/production, but it seems a lees condescending solution than blaming millions of consumers for using an inefficient device in a greenwashing PR puff piece which serves mostly to benefit the reputations of the mobile phone companies.

All phone chargers already use switching PSU's Sam, else they would weigh much too much because they'd need a transformer.
And we already have the technology to make them use really extremely little power when not charging, it's just a matter of implementing it.
In short I'm not too worried about these chargers, there's a lot of better ways to start saving energy.
Last but not least, in somewhat civilised countries the consumer can(or should be able to) opt for green power that doesn't pollute and so it doesn't matter it wastes some energy

.......have chargers that only complete the a/c circuit when the device to be charged is plugged in............that way the charger pulls no current when plugged into a socket even if the punter is too lazy to switch the socket off!!

Aah, happy with the thought that the world is a better place, my charger switched off while i play crysis on my pc system that draws 500w for 4 hours every night!

All the fuss about the "vampire losses" from wall wart chargers sounds a lot like the dire warnings of Y2K days, which wound up being meaningless.
HEY my wall wart is shedding its wasted 0.5W power as HEAT in my HOUSE and its COLD OKAY?????
I do NOT like garlic. You can read that any which way you want.

While some of the last minute hype about terrorists and such was just news-media hype, Y2K was a demonstrably significant problem and the only reason it didn't turn into a disaster was that tons of work was spent fixing it in preparation.

Even then, there were plenty of Y2K failures that "slipped through the cracks" like the failure of the US spy satellite system, see this:

http://www.infosecnews.org/hypermail/0001/1918.html

or google "y2k satellite glitch" if that URL does not get posted

The Cambridge physicist David MacKay makes a mockery of this myth that phone chargers have an impact on energy consumption in his book "Sustainable Energy - without the hot air" (free download).

http://www.withouthotair.com/

"All the energy saved in switching off your charger for one day is used up in one second of car-driving.

The energy saved in switching off the charger for one year is equal to the energy in a single hot bath."

- David MacKay

Check this out: http://www.inference.phy.cam.ac.uk/sustainable/charger/

I'm not losing sleep over my chargers.

I seem to recall one Nokia N95 model - which has the battery life smaller than the average person is awake for a day. I also recall countless Motorola batteries being absolutely useless. The one godly famous noise I hear in the afternoons heading back from work wherever i go is the dreaded "blip" sound of a dying motorola. Never hear the Nokia's because they're already dead by that time of day. Give us a better battery and i'll save your poor polar bear.


What ever happend to Natural Selection?