USB develops rapidly. My fleet of chargers always went outdated well before they went old.
Comment on Is it OK to leave device chargers plugged in all the time? An expert explains
hendrik@palaver.p3x.de 4 weeks ago
Tl;dr: Consider unplugging them, they all consume some standby power and that adds up. Also they wear out.
Though: I've never noticed any of the 24/7 devices I own wear out, I think that might be a myth?
Zwuzelmaus@feddit.org 4 weeks ago
AbidanYre@lemmy.world 4 weeks ago
I have a drawer full of them that aren’t useful because half an amp isn’t enough to charge anything anymore.
WhyJiffie@sh.itjust.works 4 weeks ago
that’s because phone makers were pumping out garbage chargers with bare minimum performance for every single phone, isn’t it?
HyperfocusSurfer@lemmy.dbzer0.com 4 weeks ago
I mean, transistors and ICs do degrade over time, hovewer, out of all the power supplies I’ve repaired, the vast majority had dead caps, and those kinda tend to dry out with time regardless of whether they’re in use. So, kinda negligible, just like the power consumption in standby.
Nomad@infosec.pub 4 weeks ago
Nobody considers the risk of them going up in flames at night. They have a temp trip safety, but there is still some risk left. Especially for cheap Chinese power blocks.
taladar@sh.itjust.works 4 weeks ago
Wouldn’t temperature be much more of a problem while charging and not while the charger is unplugged from the device it is supposed to charge?
Zwuzelmaus@feddit.org 4 weeks ago
You can leave away the “cheap Chinese”. I have tried to find some of high quality once, and that was a super hard task. They are all the same as the cheap Chinese, whether it’s written somewhere or not.
catloaf@lemm.ee 4 weeks ago
They’re almost all Chinese, but not all cheap. You can get ones with or without protection circuitry.
truthfultemporarily@feddit.org 4 weeks ago
The capacitors have a limited lifetime.
taladar@sh.itjust.works 4 weeks ago
Maybe but is that lifetime limited by on/off cycles or by wall time?
cmnybo@discuss.tchncs.de 4 weeks ago
Electrolytic capacitors wear out due to age whether they are used or not. Heat makes them wear out significantly faster. If the power supply is not under load, it shouldn’t be producing any noticeable amount of heat.
PennyRoyal@sh.itjust.works 4 weeks ago
I have a whole bunch plugged in constantly for various synth nonsense. Running off solar, I thought it would be worth seeing how much of a difference it makes turning everything off at night, and basically it wasn’t worth the effort. It’s like a percentage point on top of the things like my fridge that run constantly, and is way less than using my toaster once a week. That said, if you’re on mains, it’s probably a worthy consideration if a lot of people were to do it, but it’s also probably comparable to using ChatGPT once a day or something
Enkers@sh.itjust.works 4 weeks ago
Cool cool cool. I’ll just continue not using chatgpt and we’ll call it a wash.
PennyRoyal@sh.itjust.works 4 weeks ago
Yeah, that’s pretty much my attitude. Why am I worrying about a watt here and a watt there when muppets are constantly asking LLMs inane questions and getting them to make dodgy hentai.
WanderingThoughts@europe.pub 4 weeks ago
The article is very light on details. There are better articles with some real numbers.
Chargers for a phone draw 0.1W roughly. That’s 0.9 kWh per year, and with a price of €0.35/kWh would be €0.32 / year / charger you leave plugged in. That’s not even a rounding error compared to what my heat pump uses.
Devices with an indicator light barely use anything more. The ones with a display or clock do use more power, usually a few watt, what then comes down to maybe €10 / device / year using napkin math.