They don’t make ’em like that any more: things you can switch off
Back in the day, most electrical or electronic appliances had an on/off switch. When you switched an appliance off, it was really off; it consumed no energy.
In 2024, the only electrical appliance in my house that I can actually switch off when I’m not using it, without disconnecting it from the electricity supply, is my toaster. Everything else, without exception, consumes some small amount of energy, even when it appears to be switched off. In this article I consider how much energy I’m wasting, and whether it really matters. Of course, any wasted energy is a bad thing for the natural environment; a more pragmatic question is how significant is our abandonment of on/off switches, compared to other ways in which we waste energy every day?
The hidden cost of not being able to switch off
According to energy company Centrica, in 2022 British households were wasting an average of £147 per year powering devices that could be switched off, but weren’t. It’s not a king’s ransom, but it’s not pocket change, either. It’s not that we don’t switch off, but increasingly that we can’t.
How did we get here?
It seems to me that our present predicament results from two major technological developments in the 80s and 90s.
First, we learned to appreciate the convenience that comes from having appliances that don’t really turn off. If they don’t turn fully off, then we can turn them on with remote controls, or have them operated by a timer. Appliances that don’t turn fully off are quicker to come to a functional state when we actually need them. Thankfully, the worse excesses have been eliminated by regulation. We will, I hope, never again see horrors like the ’80s televisions that consumed 40W in standby, just keeping their tubes warm, so we wouldn’t miss the first thirty seconds of Eastenders. In fact the UK, along with many other regions, now has quite strict regulatory limits on standby power for some kinds of appliance.
Second, the use of external power supples (EPSs) became commonplace. An EPS is more commonly known as a mains adapter, wall adapter, or – my favourite term – ‘wall wart’. These devices connect to a mains outlet, and produce a lower-voltage DC supply for the appliance.
Manufacturers like EPSs because they make the appliances themselves cheaper to construct. Appliances don’t have to be constructed to the same safety standards as they would if they had dangerous mains voltages internally. The development of switching-mode power supply technology allows a relatively small EPS to supply quite a large current; so there’s no longer a need for large, heavy mains transformers to be built into an appliance.
Unfortunately, the use of an EPS means that, even if the appliance actually has an on/off switch that works as it should, the EPS will still consume a small amount of energy when the appliance is switched off.
How much? Unfortunately, it’s impossible to generalize in this area. Manufacturers claim that modern EPSs use ‘negligible’ energy when not powering anything. But ‘neglible’ here means ‘much lower than when the appliance is running’. The EPS for my old Lenovo W520 uses about 1 watt when completely disconnected. It’s neglibible compared to the 100W+ that the laptop uses when working hard, but it’s not even close to irrelevant. However, my Samsung USB cellphone chargers draw less than 0.1W (that’s the limit I can measure) when not charging anything. The energy wastage of a disconnected EPS depends on the design and the quality of components, which is why we can’t make general statements.
Of course, we aren’t really interested in the energy usage of a disconnected EPS, because it will usually be connected to an appliance that can’t be switched off. These pointless energy-wasters have become known as ‘vampire’ appliances – they drain a little energy in the polite way that a vampire bat drains blood: not so much that the victim notices, but a significant amount over a long period.
Here are some representative power consumption figures for electrical devices in my own home.
| Lenovo desktop computer | 7W (sleep), 0.5W (“off”) |
| Leak amplifier and CD player | 0.5W each |
| Denon A/V amplifier | 0.5 W |
| Networked audio player | 0.5W |
| Lenovo laptops on charge | 5W (sleep), 0.5W (“off”) (I have five of these) |
| XBox One console | 15W (sleep), 0.4W (“off”) (I have two) |
| XBox controller charger | 0.5W (when maintaining charge) |
| Disconnected cellphone chargers | < 0.1 W (I have many, including wireless charge pads) |
| Cellphones/tablets on charge | ~1W (I have eight of these) |
| Video projector | 0.1W (standby) |
| Clothes washing machine | 0.5W |
| Dishwashing machine | 0.5W |
You’ll notice, perhaps, that the figure “0.5W” appears frequently: that’s the UK regulatory limit that applies to many kinds of appliance. I would guess that, taken all together, these electrical vampires do total to the 40W or so, that would be needed to cost the £147 that Centrica claims.
Note I should point out that I’m not including in this total the appliances that I really prefer to leave running all the time. These include my networked printer (4W), network storage (NAS) (2W), cordless phones, various clocks and things that contain clocks, like the oven, and so on. I’m only considering things that really should be switched off, but have no real on/off switch.
What seems unforgivable to me is that many of the electrical appliances that I can’t switch off do actually have a real on/off switch. For example, my Leak amplifier and CD player, and my desktop PC, have real on/off switches on the back. It’s not that the manufacturer is trying to save a pound or two by not having the switch – it’s there, but in a place I can’t reach. What’s the point of that?
Electrical safety issues
In my lifetime I’ve seen two dramatic failures of electrical appliances (other than those due to my own carelessness or poor design). In both cases, the culprit was an EPS. On one occasion, the wall-wart powering an external disk drive went bang unexpectedly. All the lights went out, there was a horrible smell of burning, and a puff of smoke; the disk was damaged beyond repair.
The other event concerned a simple USB phone charger. For no obvious reason, a tongue of hot sparks shot out of the side of it, through a hole that had been blown in the casing. This did no great harm – just some burn marks on the carpet.
It’s a fact of life that electrical devices sometimes fail, sometimes dramatically. A devices that is switched off – really off – can’t present a risk of this kind. On balance, if something is going to explode in my house, I’d rather it happen when there’s somebody around to deal with it, than when the house is empty.
Both failures I described were of branded items from well-known suppliers. I don’t know whether the cheap, unbranded items you can buy from on-line auctions are more or less likely to fail, than the more expensive ones.
While we are increasingly aware of the energy wastage of devices we can’t switch off, we don’t seem to consider the safety implications very often.
Putting it in perspective
In the UK, a typical household is currently paying about £2000 per year for energy. The amount wasted by leaving electrical appliances on standby probably amounts to about 10% of that, give or take. I’m not entirely comfortable with wasting 10% of the energy I use, when there’s simply no good reason to.
But we can look at this in a different way. My modest car uses about 50kW at cruising speed on a level, straight road. That’s about 1,250 times as much energy as all my vampire appliances waste put together. Running all these appliances for a year uses the same amount of energy as driving for seven hours. Another way to think about this is that I could save this energy by driving for seven minutes less every week.
Or, in fact, I could save it by running my central heating for three minutes less per week. Yes, that’s per week, not per day. It’s 25 seconds per day.
The reality is that transport and climate control (heating and cooling) cost most people astronomically more than vampire appliances. They cost much more even than appliances that typically run all the time, like smart speakers and video doorbells. Even leaving your XBox in it’s 14W ‘standby’ mode – as egregious as I consider this behaviour – still uses a trivial amount of energy, when compared to transport and climate control.
If you want to save energy – and we all should – there are far better ways to do it, than to unplug every electrical device we aren’t using. Of course, if our appliances could actually be switched off, we wouldn’t have to unplug them.
What kind of example are we setting?
The real problem, it seems to me, in making appliances that can’t be switched off, is that this quietly ingrains in our society a tolerance of waste. These appliances send a message that it’s OK to throw away energy. Ater all, why should I go to any trouble to save electricity, when designers and vendors of electrical devices – who really ought to understand the issues – clearly don’t think it matters?
For sure, we could save more energy by doing other things that switching off. But if the trivial act of switching off is too much effort, why should we do any of the more difficult things?
Wanting to be the kind of person who sets a good example, I spent the weekend reorganizing the wiring in my home office – which has 38 electrical outlets – so that a single on/off switches now controls the supply to everything that doesn’t need to be powered all the time. It’s a small thing, I know, but I feel better for it.
Does this mean I will walk to the baker’s shop rather than driving, even when it’s raining?
Probably not, if I’m being honest.
