Switch off from the wall

The need to ‘Switch off from the wall’

Electricity is the most important basic necessities in today’s day and age, most of our daily activities will cease to function if electricity supply has been stopped. In fact, electricity has become such a pivotal part of human lives that we can even determine a person’s standard of living based on the electricity his household consumes. However, no matter from which spectrum of the standard of living we belong to we are all affected by the invisible killer known as standby power.

Vampire like nature of standby power

Standby power is also being referred to as vampire power these days purely due to its nature, it refers to the way in which electricity is consumed even while the appliances are switched off. Many appliances have no standby features but are equipped with external power supplies (commonly known as wall-packs). Even when they aren’t functioning, they end up consuming a small amount of energy in low voltage power supplies, mainly due to the quality of the transformers.

The impact of standby power usage is very straight forward, it accounts for 5% of the total electricity used in the residential sector, one of the root causes for increase in our carbon footprint.

Let us consider the example of a WiFi router, when one is using a WiFi router the maximum consumption would be 10 watts * 16 hours = 160 watt-hours

When one is not using the WiFi router, the electricity consumed would be 4 watts * 8 hours = 32 watt-hours.

One ends up using 16% excess electricity by keeping the router on standby mode rather than switching it off completely.

How can we reduce the usage of standby power?

There are two methods available to reduce the consumption of such power, the first one is a behavioral change and the second one being technical

1. Switching and plugging off your appliances whenever possible.

2. The second method would involve redesigning of circuits used inside the appliances which can reduce standby power consumption by 80%.

Our mission at Revour consumer is to design energy efficient products which keeps the usage of standby power at a minimum this in turn will improve our carbon offset and help us align with our climate change goals.