Nokia aims to cut power use of phone chargers

Stuart Corner
Friday, 11 May 2007 04:01

Opinion and Analysis

Nokia has added a feature to some of its cellphones that will suggest people unplug the charger once the phone is charged, to save electricity. That is praiseworthy but impractical, and the claimed savings questionable.

Starting with the new Nokia 1200, Nokia 1208 and the Nokia 1650, the alerts will be rolled out across the Nokia product range. Nokia claims the move could save enough electricity to power 85,000 homes a year.

It is a great headline-grabbing statistic but meaningless without qualification. What are they assuming is the power consumption of the average home? In Nokia's arctic homeland the need for heating would likely bump it up, in tropical Australia so would air-conditioning? But that aside, is this figure based on the technology achieving 100 percent penetration of Nokia phones, or 100 percent of all phones?

Still, Nokia does have a point. However I suggest their advice is impractical. My charger is plugged into a distribution board beneath my desk along with numerous others. I suspect I am not alone in this. And there is no way I am going to grovel on the floor every time I want to charge my phone, and then again when it is fully charged.

That said, this is just one of Nokia's power-saving initiatives. Last year the company's newest range of chargers were awarded an Energy Star by the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) in the US for their energy efficiency. According to Nokia, "the chargers, in use since 2005, far exceed the EPA standards by using 50- 70 percent less energy than the Energy Star requirement, and also meet the highest European Union standards."
 
The company has set ambitious goals to further reduce the energy consumption of its chargers. By 2010 it aims to have reduced by an additional 50 percent the amount of electricity a charger consumes whilst still plugged into the mains but not the phone.

That's good and in stark contrast to the other extreme where there are manufacturers of electrical devices that seem designed to waste power unnecessarily. I bought a small desk lamp recently with a low voltage halogen bulb. The transformer that drops the mains voltage to 12 volts is located in the base of the unit along with the on/off switch. Logic would suggest that the switch be in the primary of the transformer so the device draws no power when switched off, but no, it is the secondary so that at all time the unit is warm and the primary sucking power from the mains.

And yes, I know that this power is minimal and that, in theory and with a 100 percent efficient transformer that power would be zero, but we are talking here about a $20 product. They should be banned, or at least made to carry a warning. I suspect that day is not too far away.