This next post...

...kinda follows on from the one about world poverty and climate change, strickly speaking it's really more about climate change. I thought i should post something about what we can all do to help with problems with climate control, the obvious one being less wasteful with our power usage. It's not new, i've noticed for years adverts and presumably government paid things telling us not to leave our TV's, videos and other electrical equipment on standy by during the night when head off to bed. With the little red light sitting on we've been told that it can use upto 40% of the power needed for using these things normally, it sounds remarkable that it can be so much but if it's true then it's certainly in our own interest to switch things off properly. Even if you are a cynic about global warming then you can always think of your own electricity bill.

As it happened i was en route to the hospital for a check up on my recovering collarbone(broken playing football) and anticipating waiting around to be seen i made sure i had a decent newspaper to read while i was waiting and lo and behold on the front page of The Independent yesterday was a story headlined 'Standby Britain', excellent timing for my needs. So this has given me a few more details on just how much power is wasted by leaving our appliances on standyby. I admit i've not actually read the story properly yet, i started with the sport section and then left the paper in the house by mistake when i was going out later, but i'll go through it just now and post the salient facts.

Some facts and figures:

• Appliances on standby pump one million tonnes of carbon into the atmosphere.
• Wasted energy of appliances on standyby could power 400,000 homes.
• Up to 85 per cent of power used by a VCR is consumed when on standyby.
• Governmentsays Britain would save 240,000 tonnes of CO2 emissions by switching off televisions.
• Dishwashers left "on" at the end of their cycle consume 70 per cent of the power used when they are running.
• Tumble-dryers can use 38 per cent of normal power while waiting at the end of a cycle.
• If lights were turned off when not in use it would prevent 375,000 tons of CO2 emissions and save £55m in bills.
• The is little difference between the power requirement of digital receivers when they are on and on standby.
• Each year gadgets apparantly turned off waste enough electricity to power a city the size of Birmingham for a yea or keep Britains street lights burning for four year.

So really there isn't any excuse not to turn our electrical goods OFF when we arn't using them and theres no better time to start than the present.