Do you know that your microwave consumes more electricity in running its clock than heating the food? Conventionally heating food requires almost 100 times more power than running a digital clock. Still wondering how your microwave sucks that amount of energy just to power a clock?
It’s all because of the “standby mode” that turns your electronics into energy sucking parasites. The electronics that we use in daily life today usually consist of an electronic switch which is controlled by a circuit that never shuts down. The circuit keeps on scanning the remote control of the device hence enabling you to operate the device remotely. Once the equipment is turned off it keeps feeding the circuit. That is the basic reason why equipment is said to be on stand by mode.
The amount of energy that is dissipated in the process is enormous. According to a report compiled by Pune based Energy Company, Prayas energy group “Using a diverse set of data sources – national sample surveys, trends and projections of appliance sales, and sample energy consumption studies, the study shows that if all future sales are of energy efficient models for key appliances, India can save about 57,000 million units and avoid 50 Mt of CO2 emissions annually by 2013. Retrofitting of lights accounts for about half the savings while ceiling fans, TVs, refrigerators, and reduction in stand-by power account for another 40 per cent of the potential savings in households,”
The report also illustrated that with the usage of more energy efficient home appliances, the nation could have saved upto 57000 million units of electricity by 2013. That means we could have avoided the generation of additional 20,000 MW power over a period of five years or setting up of ultra-mega power plant per year
