Standby power.

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pre65
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#1 Standby power.

Post by pre65 »

With things like TVs these days having switched mode power supplies, is it better for the equipment if they are left on standby rather than switched off every night ?

It's not the cost aspect (electricity) I'm concerned about.
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Thermionic Idler
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#2 Re: Standby power.

Post by Thermionic Idler »

Good question, my impression is that a lot of this stuff is designed to be powered into standby with the remote control handset for customer convenience. We have a Samsung smart TV and I think it receives updates overnight when it's put into standby.

The linestage I've just completed, as some of you will have seen, has an "always on" 5v supply to the logic board to enable power-up via the remote. And that's traditional linear, not switched-mode.

You'll probably gather from the above that this household is far too lazy to power everything off at the socket each night! That said, I do try and remember to unplug it from the mains if we're going away for any length of time.
Deck: Garrard 301 - Audio Origami PU7 - NW Analogue DH3S
Phono: Pete Millett LR, Lundahl SUT, AMB σ22 PSU
Linestage: Bruno Putzeys Balanced Pre + Hans Polak relay mod, LCDuino control
Power amps: 300B PP 'Symmetric Reichert'
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jack
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#3 Re: Standby power.

Post by jack »

No real difference - SMPS's don't care about "standby" mode, in fact a standard PC SMPS still runs a reasonable current 5V (+5VSB, pin 9 of the PSU connector) line to keep bit of the motherboard alive when nominally the machine is powered off.

The thing that kills all PSUs, SMPS or linear, is heat near capacitors.

An SMPS in standby will run stone cold. A good SMPS in a TV will also run cool pretty much all the time - the only real things that they are powering are the backlight LEDs (or maybe on older sets, a CFL) and a bit of audio - hardly a strain. Considering that they are typically 90% efficient, there is not a lot of heat even under load.

I really wouldn't worry about it, except if you're very cost-conscious - a good metric is that 1 Watt for a year costs about 1 quid, so if your TV consumes 5W in standby, then that's costing you about 5 quid over the year.
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