Originally Posted by Jamie Dame:
“not sure if this is relevant but do Digital Radios cost more to run than other applicances, radios, from mains?
I have run a digital radio from batteries and had a very short life from them.”
When being run from the mains, the power drawn by the radio itself may well be insignificant compared with the efficiency of the power adapter (whether external or internal) such that it hardly matters how much power the radio itself uses.
For instance a radio which takes 1 watt when running on batteries is going to drain them pretty quickly (2x AAA would be dead after about 3 hours or so), but when running on mains power, 1 watt is negligible and you might find it actually draws 2 or 3 watts from the wall.
An analogue radio which takes 0.1 watt on battery power (a typical amount at modest volume levels) and which lasts 30 hours on the same 2x AAA might still take 2 or 3 watts on mains power because of the inefficiency of the mains supply when powering a very small load.
Besides, lets get things in perspective. If you pay 15p per kWh (a typical amount today), then each watt a device draws from the socket costs you only 0.015p per hour, or 0.36p if you leave it on for 24 hours. So a device which uses 3 watts costs about a penny per day if left on all day. It therefore hardly matters whether you run an analogue or digital radio on mains power, because the cost of the amount of power they use is negligible.
Bear in mind those same 3 watts would be the equivalent of draining AA alkalines at the rate of nearly one per hour, the cost of running battery powered equipment from the mains is generally not worth worrying about.,