2009-10-05

Sky eco hype?

OK, having crashed my sky box I restarted it and get a nice red and greed sky logo with an iguana on it saying... "We all can do our bit to be greener. By switching your sky box to standby, together we can save enough energy to light all the homes in Birmingham for a whole year..."

WTF!

Whatever saving is made is on-going. If everyone switching sky boxes to standby saves enough energy to light all the homes in Birmingham then surely it does so forever, well, as long as people are still switching to standby. Where does the "for a whole year" come in?

Did I miss something or does eco hype not have to make any sense whatsoever?

10 comments:

  1. I remember reading somewhere that the Sky box on standby mode only turns off the signal output to the TV and the box remains on almost full power. Don't know if that's entirely true though...

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  2. Sky push the Anytime content overnight too.

    I think its all Bollocks, just jumping on the Eco bandwagon!

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  3. Power consumption: http://www.digitalspy.co.uk/forums/showthread.php?t=600697

    If you round it to 20W standby 40W powered, then that's a saving of 175Kw/year per box (if my maths is right, anyway), or about 2,900 60W light bulbs per year.

    This of course assumes you leave a Sky box in standby 24/7 for a year, which is a stupid assumption (you'd just unplug it) but let's run with it.

    Number of Sky subscribers? About 10 million. So if all 10 million switch to standby for a year they'd save enough energy to light 36 billion light bulbs.

    If all Sky subscribers switched to Standby for *1 hour* then they'd save enough to power 1.5 billion light bulbs.

    How many light bulbs in Birmingham? I can't find any reference to that (and the lack of a figure for that calls into question the whole premise anyway).

    Approximating the population of birmingham of a little over 1 million (from the birmingham.gov.uk website) for the comparison to make sense Sky are saying that each person in that city personally owns and uses 24/7 between 1500 and 36,000 lightbulbs.

    Bright city.

    (Feel free to correct the maths..)

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  4. Gah. Multiplying that out the maths don't make any sense at all. Don't know where I went wrong there..

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  5. Alternatively, cancel your Sky subscription and hack the box to bits with a pickaxe... think of all the cash and CO2 you'll save! ;-)

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  6. Have you got that Sky box home page that repeats mindless craptrap incessantly? After a bit it makes me start to throw things. By the 50th time it repeats I'm sure it would be justifiable grounds for homicide against a Sky senior manager.

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  7. Tony the point is the extra unit "for a whole year". I was not even tryign to check the maths. If there is a saving by switching to standby (every night) then it saves power on an on-going basis. It does not stop saving power after a year.

    It either saves enough energy to light all the homes in Birmingham, or it doesn't. The "for a whole year" does not come in to it. That was my gripe.

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  8. We're missing a "size of Wales" comparison here.

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  9. I so nearly put that comment in too....

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  10. The problem is that the vast majority of marketing departments don't understand the difference between kW and kWh i.e. power and energy.

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