Those innocuous-looking ‘wall warts’ that plug into the mains to recharge the batteries in most portable electronic devices including mobile phones, laptops and digital music players have a dark side.
If you leave them plugged in after removing the portable device they continue to consume a small amount of power or ‘vampire energy.’ While the amount of energy wasted by a single wall charger is fairly insignificant, it quickly adds up if everyone does it.
(I checked with the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory which calculates that a mobile phone power supply consumes an average of 0.26 watts on its own.)
Some estimates suggest that about 80 per cent of US mobile phone users leave a charger plugged in even when the device isn’t charging. That means over a year they collectively waste enough vampire energy to power 24,000 homes, or brew three to four million cups of coffee each day.
As the saying goes, old habits die hard, but AT&T has partnered with California-based Superior Communications to come up with a smart solution called the AT&T Zero charger.
Unlike ordinary wall chargers, the Zero charger eliminates wasted vampire energy by automatically sensing when a mobile phone is not plugged up to the charger, thus cutting the power supply from the wall socket.
The Zero charger is also designed to reduce energy consumption by charging more efficiently and consumers will be able to use the Zero charger with multiple devices simply by swapping charger cables.
Most mobile phone manufacturers are committed to moving towards the micro USB as a standard charger port, but ahead of that, the Zero charger’s ‘block and cable’ will also allow them to use the same charger for future handsets and therefore cut the number of chargers produced, reducing future landfill waste.
The Zero charger will cost $30 – about the same as most ‘dumb’ replacement chargers – when it goes on sale in AT&T stores and online in May.
