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From Tim Newing

I disagree with your statement that charging a laptop battery “little and often reduces its capacity to charge” (15 November, p 42). This may have been true in the past – when nickel-cadmium batteries were the standard – but lithium-ion/metal hydride batteries do not suffer the same affliction. With more intelligent chargers, the necessity to charge-cycle your batteries has gone.

From Matthew Walker,

You say that electrical items that are turned off and not left on standby use no electricity. In creating our online power-consumption database, we have found that this isn’t always true and is sometimes alarmingly false. For example, we discovered a microwave oven that uses 80 watts while doing nothing, and a cathode-ray-tube monitor that consumes 7 watts just by being plugged in. On the other hand, the TV set-top box you mention may use 17 watts on standby, but mine uses just 5.

London, UK

Thornleigh, New South Wales, Australia