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1. Always sad for me to know how much popular are wireless chargers, wasting 47% more energy aprox for charging the same as a wired charger. https://debugger.me

• binkHN 3y ago
  > Always sad for me to know how much popular are wireless chargers, wasting 47% more energy aprox for charging the same as a wired charger. The energy waste is a shame, but the convenience factor is mighty high, not to mention the wear and tear on your USB-C port is non-existent. Maybe one point for less USB cable waste and tossing perfectly good phones just because their USB ports are damaged?
  • imp0cat 3y ago
    You can get one of those magnetic adapters if you worry about your USB-C port that much.
• mtmail 3y ago
  This 2016 article puts the cost of charging an ipad at $1.55 per year (iphone lower but I assume batteries got bigger or time). 47% wastage with wireless chrome is not much in terms of energy costs. https://www.zdnet.com/article/how-much-does-it-cost-to-charge-an-iphone-for-a-year/ https://www.zdnet.com/article/how-much-does-it-cost-to-charg...
• gruez 3y ago
  >1. Always sad for me to know how much popular are wireless chargers, wasting 47% more energy aprox for charging the same as a wired charger. https://debugger.medium.com/wireless-charging-is-a-disaster- https://debugger.medium.com/wireless-charging-is-a-disaster-... (too much catastrophic conclusions in this article but that percentage is real, you could check it in another tests, articles, whatever ..) The percentage value looks bad but how much is that in absolute terms? Using the figures from the article, wireless charging uses 6.75 Wh more per full charge. Assuming you charge that much every day, that's 2.46 kWh per year, or 42 cents at average US electricity prices[1]. I think that's a price worth paying for the convenience. [1] https://www.bls.gov/regions/midwest/data/averageenergyprices_selectedareas_table.htm https://www.bls.gov/regions/midwest/data/averageenergyprices...
  • GuB-42 3y ago
    Maybe it is, but we are talking about the Fairphone. A phone that the company pitches as more eco-friendly than the competition. Lacking a feature that is known to be wasteful in terms of energy is fitting. Maybe it is negligible, but I suspect that in the grand scheme of things, the whole "fair trade" thing is negligible too, it didn't stop the company from building on that. At least, it sends a good message.
    • hsbauauvhabzb 3y ago
      What’s the environmental cost of USB charging assuming wear on the cable? I seem to naturally go through one per year, I have a friend whose pets love to destroy cables so I assume they go through more. Electricity can be solar, meaning that it could be close enough to zero environmental impact - think 20 years from now when we’ve got our crap together when it comes to sustainable energy.. Edit: a point below comments on increased battery wear which I fully agree with.
      • richwater 3y ago
        How terrible are people treating their cables? That number is insane to me.
• asolidtime1 3y ago
  >> 1. Always sad for me to know how much popular are wireless chargers, wasting 47% more energy aprox for charging the same as a wired charger. Sure, but compared to everything else we use, smartphones use almost no energy. The one I'm typing this on has a battery capacity of 12 wh; if you have a resistive electric water heater, standing in a hot shower during the winter for an extra second would offset half of that.
  • sowbug 3y ago
    Ouch! I already feel bad about shaving in the shower! That is an evocative way to put it.
  • delecti 3y ago
    This nerd sniped me and I had to do the math to confirm, but you're right, at least depending on where you get your estimates and regional power costs. The energy equivalent between a cell phone and shower time is on the order of seconds. My phone's battery is 4385 mAh @3.7V, or 0.016 kWh, and my power costs $0.1252/kWh, or about $0.002 per phone charge. Based on some super surface-level estimates from googling, a typical shower is about 2 gallon/min, and the cost to heat water is about $0.01-0.02 per gallon, meaning for me it's actually about 4 seconds of hot water per phone charge.
    • wryanzimmerman 3y ago
      And the parent comment said “47% wasted power … extra second … would offset half of that” and 47% of four seconds is about two, half of that is one second, so I’d say that was shockingly accurate, wow!
    • asolidtime1 3y ago
      Yeah, the math I did was for heating water by 50 kelvins for a 9 l/min showerhead, which in hindsight was probably overestimating it. It'd make sense if the actual answer for most people was 2-4 seconds
  • zlg_codes 3y ago
    This is the one less eco-friendly thing I'm not letting go of. Hot showers are amazing.
• sowbug 3y ago
  Your point on wireless-charging waste is valid, but I'm not sure a hypothetical initiative to reduce national electricity consumption should prioritize addressing it. The waste is similar to using a 7-watt LED bulb one hour extra per day (16Wh phone battery requires an extra 47% or 7.52 watts to charge wirelessly from 0% to 100% each night). The concern about wireless inefficiency is very well-placed, however, in the case of electric cars. EVs will become an enormous consumer of electricity in the near future, so small changes now can have a big cumulative effect. "Charge your car as conveniently as your phone" would be an effective marketing tagline, so to that extent I agree that phones set a bad example for needless energy consumption in the name of convenience. (edit: oops, bunch of other commenters made the same point while I was writing mine)
  • Sebb767 3y ago
    > The concern about wireless inefficiency is very well-placed, however, in the case of electric cars. I don't think so. For one, with EVs you are paying pretty directly for the charge and nearly 50% extra for the hassle of not plugging in the cable seems excessive. For a charging station it would probably be more profitable to hire someone to plug your car in instead of going wireless, even disregarding the setup cost. But, more importantly, fast wireless charging generates heat. This is fine for the miniscule amount of energy in phones, but would probably pose a serious problem with the wattage involved in changing EVs. We're currently at the point of having charging cables with integrated cooling, the inefficiency of wireless would likely either cook the car or limit the speed too much to be viable ("charge your car as conveniently as your phone, in a meager three days!").
• numpad0 3y ago
  Qi receivers on phones don't wear out as fast as physical connectors do. There are no hard reasons why wireless is better in durability but practically they tend to be more reliable.
  • technothrasher 3y ago
    This is exactly when I've used wireless charging the most, after my physical connector has broken. It let's me extend the life of the phone.
    • ppseafield 3y ago
      I've had three phones' (two Nexus 5Xs, one Samsung S21) USB-C ports fail on me unexpectedly, and without wireless charging suddenly I can't charge the phone. I'm unlikely to buy a phone without wireless charging for that reason.
      • throwaway81523 3y ago
        Yikes. I've had multiple laptop and phone power connectors flake out gradually but never so far suddenly. I just got my first USB-C phone because my old micro USB one was crapping out among other things. I'm gradually migrating from the old phone to the new. That would be much more hassle if the old phone was totally unable to charge. Now I'm worrying about USB-C, ugh.
        • crashmat 3y ago
          All connectors used that often break, but usbc is generally accepted as being more durable than microusb
          • throwaway81523 3y ago
            I've only experienced gradual failures so far, which give me time to fix or migrate. Sudden failure is harder to deal with. Wireless charging plus replaceable batteries would be a perfect combo.
• maegul 3y ago
  > 1. Always sad for me to know how much popular are wireless chargers, wasting 47% more energy aprox for charging the same as a wired charger. Lots of sibling replies pointing out that the absolute energy loss is negligible and reasonable price for the convenience. That’s fine. But there’s a bigger point. This convenience is being used as a justification for sticking with big brand phones. Which maybe tips the balance on the reasonableness, and, more broadly, raises the general issue of how much buying for convenience is a slippery slope. Maybe just charge with a cable?
  • fnord123 3y ago
    But sowbug has 10 dollar wireless charging pads all over his house. How can we use a cable?
    • topaz0 3y ago
      Honestly might as well buy a new house at that point
• bb88 3y ago
  > Always sad for me to know how much popular are wireless chargers, wasting 47% more energy aprox for charging the same as a wired charger. TBH some wired chargers are only 60 percent efficient in converting AC to DC. Then you'll also have energy losses inside the phone converting 5vdc to 3.7vdc for the lithium battery. But, what? this is ~7 watts per charge completely full charge? One could do the following and offset those 7 watts with a lot more to spare: Add another layer of insulation. Add a heat pump. Add solar panels to your roof. Stop mining Bitcoin.
• calamari4065 3y ago
  If you use fast wired charging, which most phones do, you're causing significant wear to the battery. With daily fast charging, I've seen phones chew through their battery in under a year. Conversely, the rather slow charge rate of wireless helps extend battery life quite a lot. This is why I never use fast charging, avoid wired charging in general, and limit my battery to 85% max charge. It's been three or four years and my battery is still at ~80% health. Which is worse, wasting a small amount of power or trashing your phone's battery in a year or two? One has significantly higher monetary and environmental costs. Besides all that, wired charging is not nearly as efficient as you think. The charge circuitry in your phone is optimistically 80-90%. The wall adapter can be anywhere from 50 to 90%, and scales pretty closely to how much you paid for it. Efficiency also goes down with faster charge rates. I design switching converters and lithium charge circuits for my job. They're pretty great, but not nearly as good as you'd think.
  • binkHN 3y ago
    > If you use fast wired charging, which most phones do, you're causing significant wear to the battery. I don't know about other Android phones, but Google's Pixel line of phones will do a slow charge overnight and time the top off to be in line with your morning alarm. So, my thought is that effort is being made here to extend battery life by specifically not fast charging overnight.
    • calamari4065 3y ago
      That's a pretty good feature and would significantly decrease battery wear. I'm actually surprised it's implemented in the Pixel, it should be a core feature of Android
      • Symbiote 3y ago
        Sony phones have done this for years. I have a 6 year old phone, still on its original battery. It reliably lasts all day and night.
    • deleted 3y ago
      [deleted]
• WheatMillington 3y ago
  The amount of energy wasted through wireless charging is absolutely miniscule in the context of an ordinary day's energy usage for a normal person.
• mcv 3y ago
  > Always sad for me to know how much popular are wireless chargers, wasting 47% more energy aprox for charging the same as a wired charger. That's also the main reason I'm not interested in wireless charging. A wire works fine, and it seems pretty obvious to me that wireless can never be as efficient. But I never had exact support for this belief, so thank you for that. > Totally agree with that, if camera is fundamental for you maybe not the right choice. With their modular approach, it would be nice if you could buy a better camera for it. I know that suggestion has been around since Fairphone 2, so I guess there must be a good reason why they're not doing that. But if Fairphone was popular enough, I bet there would be a massive aftermarket for such upgrades.
  • Moldoteck 3y ago
    I like having wireless as a temporary alternative if the usb-c port breaks
    • mcv 3y ago
      That is an excellent point. Ports are always vulnerable. On the other hand, it seems that wireless charging is also the reason why many modern phones have these stupidly fragile glass backs. So your whole phone gets more vulnerable.
      • Moldoteck 3y ago
        I don't buy it. Pixel 5 did have a kinda metallic-plastiky back (sort of plastic around wireless c, but it was impossible to spot the area with naked eye), it looked nice. You also can see the zenfone 10, it's some sort of plastic, but super nice to the touch. Having glass back is not mandatory for a wireless charging phone, I think companies do this to make more profit on repairs longterm
        • mcv 3y ago
          Maybe. I just miss the hard rubberized steel from my Motorola Milestone.