Electricity falls out of the wall socket

Bill Wright wrote:
David Taylor wrote:

How much a neon indicator consumes, however, may turn out to be
insignificant :-)

Apparently they draw about 1mA, so around 240mW.

That's about as much as all the wind turbines together were generating
last night.
Bill

There must have been a light wind then, cos if they aren't turning
they draw power to keep the bearing heaters warm

Steve Terry
--
Get a free GiffGaff PAYG Sim and £5 bonus after activation at:
http://giffgaff.com/orders/affiliate/gfourwwk

Bill Wright wrote...

No, it just means we pay a few pence per year per item for the
advantages of having it on standby. It's good value I think. It
certainly isn't an important issue.

Quite right Bill, all this global warming rubbish is a con, I mean who
needs bloody rain forests anyway.

--
Ken O'Meara

On Tuesday, June 26th, 2012, at 22:37:18h +0100, UnsteadyKen asked:

I mean who needs bloody rain forests anyway.

The people who live in them?

--

Opposing wind farms is as socially unacceptable
as not wearing a seatbelt.
-- Edward Milliband, March 2009

On Tue, 26 Jun 2012 18:45:25 +0100
"Brian Gaff" wrote:

Well ch 5 have a plus 1 so you could have looked there and recorded
it. Brian


I replied to this point at 12:29:
just before 10 o'clock, plus one hour, means just before 11 o'clock, so seeing this
news at past 11 o'clock would have been no use.
Unless "+1" means "+2".
--
Davey.

In message , David WE Roberts
writes

"Ian" wrote in message
...

I've just heard Alastair Campbell say on TV that if you leave a
socket switched to on with nothing plugged in, it still uses power.
-- Ian

According to my Lady Wife who happened to be watching (instead of being
told by others) what he actually said was that if you unplug everything
from an extension lead and the light is still on then it is still
consuming electricity.
Which must be true else where do you get the energy from to light the
neon indicator?
How much a neon indicator consumes, however, may turn out to be
insignificant :-)

Where in my post does it say I was told by "others"?

Here is an exact quote,

"you know that if you've got a plug, and it's on, and there's nothing in
it, it's uses electricity".

Look for yourself, at 40 mins in, here,

http://www.channel5.com/shows/the-wr...esday-26-june-
2

You can then refresh your Lady Wife's memory.
--
Ian

On Tue, 26 Jun 2012 19:26:10 +0100, Steve Thackery
wrote:

Mark O'Knee wrote:

- PC on standby. Older units can consume up to 10W in this mode.

You might be interested to know that my PC uses exactly the same amount
of power - 6W - whether it's on standby or switched off.

That's because all modern PCs use a "soft off" - it's part of the ATX
spec, I think.

If you don't believe me, try it on your own PC. Plug your power meter
in and start it up. From the Start menu, choose "Sleep". Once you've
measured the sleep power, restart and choose "Shut Down" instead. It's
also the same if you choose the Hibernate option. (These are the W7
commands - the XP ones are worded similarly).

To make it fall to zero you have to switch it off with the physical
switch on the back of the PSU (or unplug the lead if there's no
switch).

I'm sure it will differ between different PSUs. Also, most of those
watts may well be imaginary due to the reactive load offered by the
PSU. The main point, though, is that even though "sleep" maintains the
RAM and "shut down" and "hibernate" don't, the reading is exactly the
same.

Personally I don't give a stuff about 6W - mine stays in sleep mode
when I'm not using it.

I wasn't sure what the difference was between "Sleep" and "Hibernate"
modes until you posted your power consumption findings and apparently
there is none making the power consumption exactly the same for the
shutdown state.

I do know that hibernating is a case of saving the machine state
(essentially the ram contents and other relevant metadata) to a
hyberfile before shutting down. Part of this process is to set a flag
which modifies the subsequent bootup process to reload the machine
state instead of following the standard boot procedure which gets the
machine (theoretically at least) back to exactly the state it was in
just prior to it hibernating.

The point being that the machine is essentially shutdown and mains
power can be unplugged or switched off at the socket or even, if the
PSU is so blessed, the rear panel mains isolating switch. Of course,
if you do this, you'll have to restore mains power in order to restart
the machine just exactly as you would if you were routinely switching
the mains power off _after_ a regular shutdown in order to save, in
your case, the 6 watts standby consumption of the ATX PSU used by your
PC.

Incidently, that 6 watts reading, assuming your digital wattmeter is
being reasonably accurate shows a higher than average ATX standby
consumption. 4 watts seems to about average but I've seen this standby
power vary from as low as 1 watt to as high as 8 watts with higher
figures indicating the possibility of a fault when there's no sign of
USB standby powering being employed to account for the higher
consumption.
--
Regards, J B Good

On Tue, 26 Jun 2012 22:37:18 +0100, UnsteadyKen
wrote:


Bill Wright wrote...

No, it just means we pay a few pence per year per item for the
advantages of having it on standby. It's good value I think. It
certainly isn't an important issue.

Quite right Bill, all this global warming rubbish is a con, I mean who
needs bloody rain forests anyway.

That seems to be the current thinking by the economists. To them such
natural resources are merely "Externalities" that can be ignored in
their equations of "Economy Management".
--
Regards, J B Good

Johny B Good wrote:

I wasn't sure what the difference was between "Sleep" and "Hibernate"
modes until you posted your power consumption findings and apparently
there is none making the power consumption exactly the same for the
shutdown state.

Yes, in Windows XP, hibernate is exactly as you describe: the machine
state is written to disk and then the machine is shut down into "soft
power off". In "standby" the machine is suspended with the RAM
remaining powered. No time-consuming writing out to disk of the
machine state.

In theory you'd think the latter would use more power, as the RAM is
powered up, but it doesn't on my machine (with my wattmeter).

Windows 7 introduced a hybrid which they call "sleep". The machine
state is written to disk, but the machine then goes into standby mode
(that is, the RAM remains powered).

If the machine is woken from this state, it resumes almost instantly
from the RAM. If the power is lost during standby, the machine then
starts up from the hibernate file. This takes longer than coming out
of standby, but is still faster than a reboot.

It's a clever compromise.

Anyway, yes, my machine shows 6W whether it's in standby/sleep,
hibernate, or shut down. Presumably the power required to keep the RAM
alive is too small to register.

--
SteveT

In article ,
David Taylor wrote:
According to my Lady Wife who happened to be watching (instead of
being told by others) what he actually said was that if you unplug
everything from an extension lead and the light is still on then it
is still consuming electricity. Which must be true else where do you
get the energy from to light the neon indicator? How much a neon
indicator consumes, however, may turn out to be insignificant :-)

Apparently they draw about 1mA, so around 240mW.

Right. So they use up the output of all the wind farms?

--
*I pretend to work. - they pretend to pay me.

Dave Plowman London SW
To e-mail, change noise into sound.

On Tue, 26 Jun 2012 23:32:36 +0100
Ian wrote:

In message , David WE Roberts
writes

"Ian" wrote in message
...

I've just heard Alastair Campbell say on TV that if you leave a
socket switched to on with nothing plugged in, it still uses power.
-- Ian

According to my Lady Wife who happened to be watching (instead of
being told by others) what he actually said was that if you unplug
everything from an extension lead and the light is still on then it
is still consuming electricity.
Which must be true else where do you get the energy from to light
the neon indicator?
How much a neon indicator consumes, however, may turn out to be
insignificant :-)

Where in my post does it say I was told by "others"?

Here is an exact quote,

"you know that if you've got a plug, and it's on, and there's nothing
in it, it's uses electricity".

Look for yourself, at 40 mins in, here,

http://www.channel5.com/shows/the-wr...esday-26-june-
2

Yep, that's what he said.
--
Davey.