Strip lights and urban myths

I guess you've all seen the flourescent strip lighting left on in buildings overnight, and comptuers left on, and such. The idea behind it is that people have heard that more power is used turning those lights on and off than just leaving them running. Now, the way those lights work is that a capacitor builds up enough charge to ionise the gas inside the tube and create a conductance through the plasma, so yes there is an initial burst of higher power. However, let's look at a 40 Watt tube. These things are left running from close of business one day until opening of business the next. Maybe 5pm to 9am. That's 16 hours. It seems to me that in sixteen hours, a 40 Watt tube uses around 2,304,000 Joules of power. There is no possible way a strip light can use that much power being turned on. In fact, just about any power company should be able to tell these idiots who leave their lights on all night that a strip light uses in under ten minutes the same power it take sto turn it on. So there is no point leaving lights on unless the switching time is under about ten minutes.

The same applies with computers, although the timing is different depending on the Wattage of the system. And the simple fact is that electronic devices have a limited lifespan. The more you run them, the sooner they die. So computers left on 16 hours per night are wasting 2/3 of their lifespan in not being used at all, resulting in a much higher turnover time for replacing computers.

Why the hell do people and businesses not see this?

 

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Perhaps people are more concerned with Power surges uring the initial turning on of something and think that leaving it on means there isn't a build up.

(Of course it would just be easier purchasing a surge protector, or something that filters your load up to the voltage you require.)

 

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