We haven't owned a traditional phone in years. Between Skype and our cell phones, we've felt amply outfitted in the communication department.
Recently, however — because of the awful cell reception we get in our apartment — we've been considering buying a phone. And, because it is the 21st century, we assumed we'd go cordless. But ... now we're not so sure.
According to a recent e-newsletter we received from Verde Home, corded phones might be the greener phone choice: "If you don't really need a cordless phone consider buying a standard corded model and you'll save about 28 kilowatt hours of energy per phone annually. That may not be much individually but if just 5% of US households chose one corded phone over a cordless the energy savings would be about 140 million kilowatt hours annually."
We get a lot of e-newsletters, and most of them go the way of our trash bin before we even open them. Lesson learned: You never know where you'll find a little useful nugget of info.
Their source? The Green Book by Elizabeth Rogers and Thomas Kostigen
image via timailius; Flickr.com
© 2009 Apartment Therapy
Corded phones offer better sound quality, too. I recently swapped out my cordless phone (which got awful reception) for a vintage rotary phone and I'll never go back!
view Stiletto's profile
One other note - in a power outage a corded phone will most likely work if your phone line is still working, while a cordless phone will often not because it requires the power AND the phone line to be working.
view sillahee's profile
I keep one corded phone in case of power outages. But, otherwise, I use the cordless.
view jyw's profile
Shouldn't that be incredibly obvious. A cordless phone has a power cord, corded ones don't, guess which one uses more electricity. And of course working during a power outage is a very nice feature, rotary phones all the way for the home.
view peshue's profile
but... landlines rely on copper wire, and isn't that usually strip-mined?
view emilykristin's profile