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Is it OK to leave device chargers plugged in all the time? An expert explains
(theconversation.com)
this post was submitted on 27 May 2025
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Tl;dr: Consider unplugging them, they all consume some small amount of standby power and that adds up. Also they wear out.
Though: I've never noticed any of the 24/7 devices I own wear out, I think that might be a myth?
I mean, transistors and ICs do degrade over time, hovewer, out of all the power supplies I've repaired, the vast majority had dead caps, and those kinda tend to dry out with time regardless of whether they're in use. So, kinda negligible, just like the power consumption in standby.
The capacitors have a limited lifetime.
Maybe but is that lifetime limited by on/off cycles or by wall time?
Electrolytic capacitors wear out due to age whether they are used or not. Heat makes them wear out significantly faster. If the power supply is not under load, it shouldn't be producing any noticeable amount of heat.
Nobody considers the risk of them going up in flames at night. They have a temp trip safety, but there is still some risk left. Especially for cheap Chinese power blocks.
You can leave away the "cheap Chinese". I have tried to find some of high quality once, and that was a super hard task. They are all the same as the cheap Chinese, whether it's written somewhere or not.
They're almost all Chinese, but not all cheap. You can get ones with or without protection circuitry.
Wouldn't temperature be much more of a problem while charging and not while the charger is unplugged from the device it is supposed to charge?
No, it is when not charging you need to worry. When charging odds are you are there and so if it starts to burn you will smell it and take action before it starts a larger fire. When you are not charging you might not even be home and thus the fire will spread.
When things are normal the charger will not burn. When something goes wrong you have to worry. Most of the time you are not charging.
Not sure. Most time I read in the newspaper when some apartment burnt down, or this happens somewhere in my vicinity, it is something that was plugged in. It's super rare that this happens with unplugged chargers. So I'm pretty sure there is some chance this happens, but it's more complicated than that. For example during sleep, the human nose seems to be on standby as well, so you might not notice if your e-bike battery or your hoverboard which you're charging during the night will catch on fire. Until it might be too late. You won't be noticing the unplugged charger either, but it's less likely to fail catastrophically. But you should be worried about both. Especially the hoverboard. And not being present has the downside the fire is going to spread. But as an upside you can't die from the fire if you're not there. But yeah, if you're sitting next to it and act quickly, you can stop a situation from escalating.
And firemen always tell, people are surprised how quickly a fire turns from small to all the furniture and plastics stuff burns and it's not something a regular person can extinguish or contain any longer. So you really have to be right here. One room apart might not be enough.
Unplugged vs plugged in is moving the goal posts. I agree that a device that isn't plugged in is less likely to start a fire (while not impossible, it is very very unlikely), but that is a different situation.
I agree. We already moved the goalposts a few comment further up the thread... (And I meant plugged-in chargers that have nothing attached with my bad phrasing with "unplugged") I just wanted to tell that some of the ways to mitigate for the risk aren't very straightforward. What seems to do a lot is get smoke detectors, and a fire extingusher, so you don't spend the deciding 2 minutes in the bathroom, filling up a bucket. And some risk is always there, we almost all own quite an amount of electronic devices and batteries. (And then what people said here, don't use dubious products with less failsafes in their design, and entirely unplugged things (without a battery) are safe and will not cause a fire.)
USB develops rapidly. My fleet of chargers always went outdated well before they went old.
I have a drawer full of them that aren't useful because half an amp isn't enough to charge anything anymore.
that's because phone makers were pumping out garbage chargers with bare minimum performance for every single phone, isn't it?
I have a whole bunch plugged in constantly for various synth nonsense. Running off solar, I thought it would be worth seeing how much of a difference it makes turning everything off at night, and basically it wasn’t worth the effort. It’s like a percentage point on top of the things like my fridge that run constantly, and is way less than using my toaster once a week. That said, if you’re on mains, it’s probably a worthy consideration if a lot of people were to do it, but it’s also probably comparable to using ChatGPT once a day or something
The article is very light on details. There are better articles with some real numbers.
Chargers for a phone draw 0.1W roughly. That's 0.9 kWh per year, and with a price of €0.35/kWh would be €0.32 / year / charger you leave plugged in. That's not even a rounding error compared to what my heat pump uses.
Devices with an indicator light barely use anything more. The ones with a display or clock do use more power, usually a few watt, what then comes down to maybe €10 / device / year using napkin math.
Cool cool cool. I'll just continue not using chatgpt and we'll call it a wash.
Yeah, that’s pretty much my attitude. Why am I worrying about a watt here and a watt there when muppets are constantly asking LLMs inane questions and getting them to make dodgy hentai.