Another thing to worry about

Woke up this morning to BBC Radio 4 telling me I am wasting energy by leaving my mobile phone charger plugged-in without the phone attached to it.

Went guiltily around the house and found three such devices plugged in and doing nothing - a phone charger, a portable radio power supply and a regular battery charger. That's another £30 a year saved (some hope!).

Then I began to wonder why this is so. Can't say a bit of Googling has answered that question but it did yield this nugget from fool.co.uk.

However, after reading Rebecca Ash's book "The New Spend Less Revolution" I was embarrassed to discover that only 5% of the energy used by my mobile phone chargers is used to charge my phone -- the rest is wasted when I have it plugged in at the wall without a phone attached to it. Ash's book is packed with 364 other great tips to help you spend less, and I recommend it highly. But it is the wastefulness of phone chargers that caught my attention.

I seem to remember reading somewhere that the average microwave uses far more energy powering that little LED clock than it ever does cooking things.

There's an interesting little gizmo out there that purports to tell you just how much electricity your home is actually using and how much it costs. It apparently costs £350 - so needs to find an awful lot of phone chargers to pay for itself in any reasonable time.

What's need are devices that automatically turn themselves off completely, but which can be instantly revived by, say, a sharp tap or maybe a spoken command.