Standby for another idea

One of the ideas that has come out of the Quality of Life policy review is that manufacturers should be encouraged to make standby options on appliances automatically switch off after a certain amount of time to save energy. Now, besides the problem that many manufacturers rely on standby for maintaining, amongst other things, the clock on the appliance if it has one, or even the contents of volatile memory, there is surely a much easier solution?

Why not suggest to manufacturers that new appliances have a rechargable battery in them? The actual level of power required to maintain a television standby is not that much. The problem is that when fed from mains it receives far more than it needs, ergo it does waste power. However, standby is very useful, especially, if like me, you lose the use of your legs in the evening.

So, given that you need to, on average, maintain the ability of infra-red to work just enough that it can ramp up a transistor on the circuit board to turn the pwoer on. You could do that with a battery which would recharge whenever you had the appliance turned on. This would mean we could all carry on using standby to our hearts content and not have to reset the bloody clock every morning or rescan for channel on your freeview boxes.