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from the resist-the-urge-to-get-amped-up dept.
According to the National Resource Defense Council, Americans waste up to $19 billion annually in electricity costs due to "vampire appliances," always-on digital devices in the home that suck power even when they are turned off.
But University of Utah electrical and computer engineering professor Massood Tabib-Azar and his team of engineers have come up with a way to produce microscopic electronic switches for appliances and devices that can grow and dissolve wires inside the circuitry that instantly connect and disconnect electrical flow. With this technology, consumer products such as smartphones and computer laptops could run at least twice as long on a single battery charge, and newer all-digital appliances such as televisions and video game consoles could be much more power efficient.
...
"Whenever they are off, they are not completely off, and whenever they are on, they may not be completely on," says Tabib-Azar, who also is a professor with the Utah Science Technology and Research (USTAR) initiative. "That uses battery life. It heats up the device, and it's not doing anything for you. It's completely wasted power."Tabib-Azar and his team have devised a new kind of switch for electronic circuits that uses solid electrolytes such as copper sulfide to literally grow a wire between two electrodes when an electrical current passes through them, turning the switch on. When you reverse the polarity of the electrical current, then the metallic wire between the electrodes breaks down -- leaving a gap between them -- and the switch is turned off. A third electrode is used to control this process of growing and breaking down the wire.
He did not get the memo--reducing vampire current is not what the Internet of Things is all about.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday October 27 2016, @04:54PM
They thought I was nuts at the cable tv office, but I had them pull out all the different types of digital cable boxes they had. There were 3 or 4 different brands/models that all did the same thing. The power ratings on the sticker varied from something like 20 watts up to 70 watts. Who knows if these ratings are accurate (without a Kill-A-Watt), but I chose the low power Cisco, seems to work fine, and only gets a little warm.