Yes, these sort of anecdotal arguments are incredibly lame. There are a lot more things you could invest your time into that would make you a lot safer. Switching from gas to electric is a much bigger safety-gain than worrying about some stupid wallwart. According to these statistics, you're better off sticking to microwaving all your food. Heck, intentionally burning down your house accounts for more fires than electrical.

I thought this would clear up most of the misunderstandings.

As you probably already know chargers consist primarily of a simple transformer. Transformers have two independent circuits which are inductively coupled. Wiki for more info. A current through one coil will induce a current on another. Current is based on what resistive network it sees on the other coil (and of course itself). Under ideal conditions if there is no load (meaning resistance is ideally infinite) on the other coil no current will flow on the left side. In real life nothing is ever ideal, thus we need to get past the electrical engineering 101 ideology. It is possible for transformers to be no more than 85% efficient even without a load. The best chargers have been capable to reach 98.75% efficient. Also, further wear on the core and coils due to regular use will slowly reduce this number.

Now for pico-watts... that is a bit of an exaggeration. If a transistor (BJT) off power leakage is in area of micro-watts (considering 2v supply) I would assume a transformer (with a 120v) be in the milli-watt or watt area. this is practically negligible considering your meter on your house measures in kilos. It isn't even close to having a light bulb on 24/7. Unless you notice a big jump in your bill I wouldn't really worry about it. For the green people... their thought is that if a million people stop leaving there chargers hooked up then we would save 1 million x 1 milli-watt= 1 kilo-watt. WooHoo!!

easy check. If your charger is warm without a load, this is bad. Another way is to to test with an amp meter. I think I am going to go test this myself to find whether my proposal is correct.

If the charger burns 1 watt at idle (and we think it burns much less than this) then for a full year (8,760 hours or 8.76 khrs) that's 8.76 kilowatt-hours. At 13 cents/kilowatthour in Los Angeles USA that results in (8.76*.13)--Wait for it:

$1.14/year

Your mileage may vary.

It's already been determined (see page 2) that it used 0 watts and 0 amps at idle.

Too lazy to (dis)connect an adaptor, ahahaha how typical! ******** argument. Make it part of your daily exercise for other statistics prove Americans are fat, lazy, have little to no muscle power or bad posture, need exercise, and burn callories. The American lifestyle is far from a good example to copy albeit a good example to learn from. Yet other statistics prove microwaving food isn't healthy. Besides that, it tastes awful compared to a real, freshly made dish (canned food not included).

I once had fire because an oven got moved because I required space because I wanted to fry some pommes frites. The on/off button was on the side and got put on when I put it aside. I also had fire when (in USA) a power cable got torn apart by a sequoia hit by lightning. Here where I live, there are no power cables to be found in towns or cities anymore. Only large routes between cities for scalability reasons. Why? Security reasons like these. I also had a bad charger from China which I left in the power socket. A few days later when wanting to power up the device in question I found out the LED wasn't burning; adaptor was dead. Another adaptor I bought from Hong Kong still works though. I had lightning strikes, destroying PSU, and several monitors. If you have your (valuable) electronic devices protected by a good surge protector or disconnected you take less risk damaging your electronic devices. Surge protector also protects against fluctuation which might e.g. occur when lightning strikes near your location, or some major power outage elsewhere on a grid you share. Surge protectors also allow one to put off several devices using one switch. For your valuable workstations you keep offline preferably offsite backups, and a UPS might be something to consider, too. A laptop can be put off into suspend to ram or suspend to disk (hibernate) mode which allows it to use (almost) no W, or at least far less. Many embedded and recent processors allow lower power usage via multiple modes (cpu frequencing / scaling), or an energy efficient version exists (like Atom or AMD EE versions).

So for that reason alone it is wise to disconnect chargers when they're not in use. In general, every device always uses power when connected even while off. Especially older adaptors use more. Arguably it is indeed not worth it to disconnect a newer adaptor to save electricity. I wonder if there are databases with this information available; I'd be very interested in wading through such databases. It'd give me a more conscious incentive to change what exactly. While I don't always unplug because of convenience I realize this is potentially bad for my electricity bill, unwise regarding power surges and lightning strikes, and potentially bad for the environment. I'm trying to change this behaviour, and make the setups less complex. Because that is all it is; self-taught behaviour by a culture which wastes resources which can be changed and/or reversed. That is what it is about. Coincidentally, in Europe, electricity and gas prices are going up; not down. And when I was living in the USA I didn't find them low either (now I pay 2-3 EUR cent per kWh). Except for gas in the car. Make that more 500% expensive (say, to pay off your national debt) and see how fun and clean the roads soon become. For the same reason as said before people don't have a huge fridge or refridgerator; they buy every now and then or store in a cool, dry place before using it. Why? Because else the fridge or freezer would be far too expensive both in initial costs (as also taxed on environmental hazard), as well as maintenance and energy bills. Longevity is also an important point. Oh, and dimmers don't save money either.

All in all, having a server or workstation on standby eats far more than an adaptor. A coffee machine connected, same. A TV, too. Not using the dryer but putting the clean laundry outside in the wind also saves a lot of costs. If I do this the summer my laundry is 1) fresh and folded just as easily (minus suits still needed to be ironed) 2) it saves me approx 40-50 EUR 3) my dryer lasts longer, and its better for the environment. A shower is also far less expensive than a bath. As one can see there are many, many other ways in which you can save your wallet and the environment. Lazyness however isn't a valid argument.

When I 1st saw these little pop ups I wondered if Nokia was covering for a poor power supply design that would overcharge the battery. Not good for lots of reasons. I'm relieved that it's just "green speak." The useless things in life I tend to ignore and move on in search of something more meaningful. FYI, I do use power strips with switches -- CFL bulbs aren't a bad idea either. Some devices consume an amazing amount of power in standby. Chances are your desktop PC supplies 5 volts to USB ports even when shutdown.

Ryan sums up my feelings. If I want my personal devices to preach tree hugging mantra I'd program it to do so myself or I'd download a piece of prewritten nagware. Unplugging the wall-wort will have an insignificant personal annual reduction in electrical consumption compared to switching one room light from incandescent to LED or CFL.

Nokia...please eliminate this nagging message in the very next firmware.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

To the poster above who stated the Nokia wall wort draws zero watts and zero amps at idle, this statement has zero facts. The power consumption isn't zero but it is very very small.
The power consumed by the N8x0 power adapter when plugged in but idle is so small that simply leaving a room light on in an unoccupied portion of your house, apartment or office for as short as an hour consumes many times more that the Nokia N8x0 adapter, at idle, wastes in an entire YEAR. Leaving a television turned on when no one is watching it, running your car engine at idle unoccupied to heat or cool the interior waste huge amounts of energy compared to the N8x0 power adapter plugged in at idle (or even at full load). Tree huggers are so ignorant and misguided. <P>I expect more from Nokia. Please remove this silly, annoying message from the Maemo firmware.

M5

No, it's been proven. I tested it. Did you bother to read the thread?

Wrong.

Your instrument is unable to read the amount of energy the Nokia adapter/charger is consuming at idle. Your instrument may say zero but that is in error. Your instrument is lacking in resolution.

The adapter draws some power at idle. If you don't want to believe me, then ask a few electrical engineers - if you know any.

Tell him Ryan.

and yes, I read the entire thread before I posted.

Any number of people here in this forum who know electronics can tell you. There is a small current draw......Hell, even Nokia is telling you, every time you unplug the N8x0 from the adapter.