No, you can’t save £30 per year by switching off your “standby” devices
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shkspr.mobi
A couple of months ago I went on a little mission around the house testing the power consumption of devices on standby, as I noticed through my energy monitor that idle power consumption was about 0.4-0.5kW while everyone was sleeping at night, which seemed high to my research of national averages.
To my surprise a number of fairly modern devices I found to have utterly terrible standby power consumption, the new buttonless electric hob in my kitchen, the two monitors for my PC on standby, the TV & Blu-ray player and an Aircon unit just to name a few.
Since then I used a few Sonoff relays around the house to add these to Alexa, the results were actually quite amazing really, about £10 per week of electricity saved, so £30-£40 per month...
So in short, if your similar to me you can actually save £300 a year, I think the key take away here is clamp/monitor your own devices and take a judgement from there, no one house/setup is the same.
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Edit, here's a very quick screenshot of the spreadsheet and data I've got to hand at the moment, in time I'll get something better cleaned up and together.
- You've included the fridge, that's not really "standby" power in the sense OP is meaning. That's active power consumption. Fridges don't have a standby mode. - As above you've included air conditioning. That looks like active power with a pump running, not standby power. I cannot envisage any way you could get that consumption in standby. I think you've made a mistake with that. - Why did you measure the Alexa with a toaster and a clock connected to it? The Alexa is 2W max. Is this toaster some kind of smart device? A normal toaster is either on or using zero power. Do clocks have a standby mode? I don't understand that. - What's the iMac power consumption mean? It uses 6.6W shutdown or in hibernate? That seems unlikely. - Are you sure you've switched these speakers into standby? That looks like they're switched on and active. - What are the lighting figures? Regular lights are zero switched off. Are these remote controlled or wi-fi lights maybe? - Your door bell is seriously using 10 watts? Are you sure? Do you mean is this actually a camera or something? - You've got eight devices involved with delivering your wi-fi and network (four access points, 2 switches, a router and a controller) . That's probably more than average and it's arguable whether that's really standby power as such in the sense OP means. - It was measured with some form of clamp meter. Have you checked that with a multimeter to see if that's really accurate? A consumer one may not be that good.
Your fridge compressor shouldn't be running 24/7, and it should mostly be on standby until temperature rises.
Another way you can quickly find big offenders is by using an infrared camera. I found various things in my house that are putting off a ton of heat when doing nothing (and using electricity to do it). My 10-year-old speakers with a built-in amp, for example, absolutely glow on infrared even when sitting there inactive 98% of the time. Now they are on a switch.
It's quite easy to use too: if something is warm when you touch it, it's burning through watts. If you expected it to be sleeping, it's either not sleeping or it's very bad at it. Don't forget the AC adapters, they can be worse than the devices they supply.
I've found the IR camera works much better than my hand for things like switching power supplies. They'll be glowing in IR while being cool to the touch even when no device is plugged into them. While each might not be a ton of power I tended to just leave them plugged in all the time.
But there are other things around as well. My old laserjet printer was another offender.
That is going to vary a lot depending on the TV. I suspect a lot of modern "smart" TVs consume a measurable amount when idle.
Are there any affordable cameras that are not completely trash? Low resolution is ok.
An infrared camera is great for tracking down and fixing insulation problems in your house, if you own a home. And fixing insulation issues really brings down your heating/cooling bills.
If you don't own a home the value proposition is a lot worse, but $200 or so still isn't bad for something that amounts to a fun toy.
EDIT: Sorry, it was $380 before Amazon points. I should have clicked into the invoice.
Morally it’s not exactly solid but at least you’re not standing on the backs of the poor to be a billionaire and all that
Many people struggle to understand this concept. In some climates and energy grids, switching from things like incandescent to LED causes a greater environmental impact. It may shift (and may have already) as LED production gets more efficient.
Even for those who can, it would take several years for the investment in a heat pump plus the waste of the old heating system to become carbon neutral, let alone cashflow positive.
Don't feel bad. This entire thread is filled with people who think they know better. Must be why UX is in such high demand these days.
I get the enthusiasm though, head pumps are really neat.
But for a huge number of people (probably the majority) who live in more temperate climates (most of Europe and the US), they are a net win both in their energy bills and environmentally marginal extremely cold climates. That's the people whom LEDs target, not the people in marginal extreme cold climates running high power-draw servers in their homes.
How would that be the case?
Switch to LED and your heating system will need to supply that extra 0.5kW.
In a climate where you are almost always running heating, this makes the benefit of switching to LED much smaller, and considering that they are much less environmentally friendly to produce, it may even tip the scale the other way.
Granted, I live in a place where AC is not needed and use laptops instead of PCs to work on. ~$40/month is my total electriciy bill (I'm on the lowest end, I know).
Idle power with NAS, router and wifi APs are on, and TVs, PCs, Monitors are in standby is about 150W. It can be lower, but it is convenient and with $0.10/kWh it is just $10 a month.
>Edit, here's a very quick screenshot of the spreadsheet and data I've got to hand at the moment, in time I'll get something better cleaned up and together.
Many of the items on the list stretch the definition of "idle". For instance, network equipment. Sure, I guess if you're not using the internet at a given time it's "idle" and therefore can be turned off, but your use of it is so random that you effectively can't turn it off. Same goes for "clock and alexa". The networking equipment category alone makes up 78W, or 20% of the total. Also, listing fridge as "idle"? You effectively need it on 24/7.
Network Equipment I actually swapped a decent amount of it - The testing showed the Netgear managed switches were using around 1W each, opposed to 20w for the DLink switch, and another 20w for a Unifi Switch.
The Hob/Microwave I manually just power off now as I don't need them on all day long, and devices which I put Alexa controller relays on were the aircon units, my PC & Monitors and the TV & Surround (other than Sky Box)
Vampire/phantom power was a specific problem where devices that were turned off by the user would still consume 5-10w. The only way to remove that power use was to completely cut the electricity to the device. From testing I did a while ago, devices made after around 2010 don't have this problem.
Deciding not to turn off a device can certainly be a problem. But it's a relatively new one.
The refrigerator isn’t constantly cooling. You could consider the time when it is cycled off to be idle. Of course it is constantly monitoring for when it needs to start cooling again. If it’s well insulated and your home is a reasonable temperature you can probably turn it off at night when you know you won’t be opening it. I don’t have any expertise. I’m just speculating.
The compressor is going to run in the morning though to make up the lost cold unless you want your ice to melt. Seems the marginal benefit would be tiny. It probably messes up the cool/defrost cycle that modern fridges go through too.
To me the DECT phone, Set top box, cable modem consumes much more than I thought. Routers/Switches are more or less align with what I thought. What surprised me was that chargers/power adapters from decent brands were doing much better than I expected. Most chargers/power adapters I have consumes ~0.1W when idle, some event shown as 0w. Except one dodgy one came with a cheap toy PC behaves pretty weirdly: peaks at around 10w when just plugged in then gradually reduced to ~1.5w. Might be because it is a traditional power supplier with a transformer in it.
So the standby power consumption of my household should be just below 100W and I don't see how I can get it close to 500W.
So these numbers don't surprise me in the slightest.
Even for sleep mode that would be huge. 30W is about the normal modern PC idle (on, but not doing anything) consumption, not any sleep / standby / off state consumption.
When these devices are in "sleep" the unit is doing nothing more than looking for an IR signal from the remote controller that it's been turned on, just like a TV does etc, so it's odd to pull such a large draw in this sleep state.
In Germany, this thinking has let to one of two things: mandatory smart meters, which may spy on you, and require an Internet connection. Beefing up the cost by a factor of, idk, a lot.
My local provider (luckily) has opted to install "semi smart" meters right before the smart meter became mandatory. Those do not need Internet connectivity (and thus, are only somewhat more expensive than the old ones). The "semi smart" part is, they allow renters to read some power consumption figures. How, you ask? do you press a button? Ask again. The meter has an encapsulated (notoriously shitty) photo diode. You need to flash a code with a flashlight to it! Only then will it display the power figures for the last week on the LCD display. Madness.
In the same vein, landlords will soon be required to provide a monthly overview of heating costs, e.g. by email. Guess who pays dearly for this service with no choice? Renters.
Bottom line: Those of us who are already on top of costs get expensive, mandatory and ultimately useless services. Those who didn't care about running the heater while the window is open probably won't care still.
My house (in CA - but not PG&E) has a 'smart meter'. Which means that they don't have to send people every month on every single residence to collect usage data for billing anymore. Cost has decreased for them. They do require internet connectivity, but it's the power company's responsibility (they have spread wifi access points across the city for this purpose, that also doubles as free wifi).
What 'spying' are you worried about with your meter? What can it report, other than your power usage, that the power company would know anyway? Presumably it even is located outdoors?
> In the same vein, landlords will soon be required to provide a monthly overview of heating costs, e.g. by email.
Well, too bad they have decided on a crappy implementation.
Traditional electro-mechanical meters keep a running sum of power used, but can't tell the power company exactly how much power you were using at every minute of the day. Such a log, although still crude, gives the power company much more insight into your daily routine than they ever had before.
That's simultaneously terrible and quite neat.
besides a smart meter is only required for certain people. only a digital meter will be required for most people. a digital meter will be smart if it gets a communication unit, however most digital meters lack these. (you need the com unit if you have more than 6kW/year, produce more than 7kW to the grid or if you have a wallbox/heat pump/etc)
however some power providers will force a smart grid (digital meter + com unit) on you and you can't deny it (you can't deny digital meters aswell) however they are not as smart as they could be and most of the time you need to send your total kW amount to the provider anyway...
(btw. your power provider and the grid provider are not always the same so it might be that you send the amount to the grid provider or you have a smart meter and the grid provider forwards it to the power provider and the grid is basically a municipal one so it might happen that each county/city might have a different one (my parents live 30km afar and have the same power provider, but we have a differet grid provider)) (smart meter usage or not is bound by the grid provider so you can't just switch it, since you would need to relocate...)
Not necessarily. My local utility (Xcel Energy in Colorado, US) is in the process of moving to new smart meters, and as far as I'm aware, there is no IHD. My apartment complex was converted a couple months ago; I can get hourly usage via the utility website on about a 3-4 hour delay, but no realtime usage.
Let me be clearer. Every new install of a smart meter in the UK is supposed to come with an IHD.
Or just the good old method of turning things off individually, one at a time.
Though obviously it’s still only on per-circuit basis, and if an idiot wired your house that may be less useful than the platonic ideal of house wiring.
https://www.leviton.com/en/products/residential/load-centers
25w * 24 * 365 = 219000w or 219kw per year.
At my current electricity rate that's £39.42 per year at a very minimum just for the TV box.
25 W * 24 h/day * 365 days/year = 219000 Wh/year = 219 kWh/year
Which makes me notice that 1 kWh / year = 1000 Wh / year = 1000 Wh / (356 * 24h) = 0.117 W. So you can quickly estimate that a device with x Watts of constant consumption will have you paying for roughly 10 x kWh in electricity a year. With electricity costs on the order of 20 cents/kWh, that means a rule of thumb is "double the wattage, that's how many $ it'll cost you to have it running all year".
Considering it is impossible to know what kind of appliances folks have in their homes the article is odd.
I have one in my desk that's then plugged to a power strip so it can cut power to multiple devices at once. It can even measure power consumption – sitting at around 80W as I type this, with a laptop, 34" monitor, Echo, wireless charger, USB switcher, USB hub, a desktop computer currently 'off', standing desk, laptop dock and the list goes on.
I should have also pointed out, I really do wish more devices would have more physical power switches where it makes sense - As an example the washing machine has a touch sensitive main power button, yet our tumble dryer (same manufacture & design) has a more physical on/off switch - The former uses a decent amount of standby power, the second uses none, the only real purpose I see is a slightly more "premium" feel to the washing machine.
"Keurig brewers – unless turned off – continuously heat the water inside the heating tank even when the brewer is sitting idle. Some Keurigs such as K-Cafe and K-Elite feature an auto-off function that switches off the brewer two hours after its last brewing to save on energy."
I guess if your machine is trashing the planet with plastic waste anyway, why not also trash it on the energy consumption side? What a disaster.
ref. https://kahawaplanet.com/does-keurig-boil-water-how-to-get-h...
https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B00R4HKIV8/ref=ppx_yo_dt_b...
Super weird, seems like a job didn't finish or something and it was trying to finish printing and just couldn't
I recently got some Blueair air purifiers and was careful to check the manual for power off functionality first. ("The autostart feature automatically restarts the air purifier at the last set speed if it has been unplugged, used with a power switch timer, or if a power failure occurs.")
You could also use some ridiculous solution like the switchbot.
I’m currently building one myself using the common SCT-013 sensor, and an ESP32 (arduino) which I plan to then store the data in either a little react app, or perhaps Grafana.
Thats quite high, I'll be checking our inverter now as its an air source heater and air con unit rolled into one.
Our biggest energy savers have been one of these (https://www.screwfix.com/p/lap-digital-immersion-timer/1804r...) at shoulder height in an easy to access location, on for 1.5hrs during the last part of Economy 7 night time tariff and then switched on when ever hot water is needed on a demand driven basis, switched off when its finished with although it cuts out after 1 or 2hrs anyway if we forget.
Thing is most appliances have a timer and heat water when it needs it, so they go on during Economy 7 anyway.
Talking to a washing machine/tumble dryer engineer the other day, the condensing tumble dryers seem to be energy saving because they dont heat the clothes up so a saving is made by not shrinking the clothes exposed to too much heat and they run at ambient air temps extracting moisture so the dry clothes much like hanging them out on the line.
The other major energy saver which means we dont have the air con on during the summer months in the UK (desert climate location in the UK - yes one exists believe it or not) is these black out blinds. https://www.blocblinds.co.uk/window_blinds/blocout_info?sour...
They sit flush with the internal wall so you can still have stuff on your window ledge, but by being flush with the internal wall means its more like triple glazing. They keep the warmth in during the winter because its very cold over night in the countryside and they keep the heat out during the summer so much so that some days when I would have put the air con on, I dont need to, or I only put the air con on for the afternoon, its temperature controlled anyway so it cuts in when it wants. And when the air con is on, the whole house is at 18 degrees C according to the downstairs central heating thermostat, its at the top of the stairs keeping bedrooms cold and the cold sinks down the stairs which keeps the downstairs cold, thats works brilliantly especially during heatwaves!
You also get fantastic sleep during the summer months as well! Cant stress that enough! We all have individual bedrooms due to different work schedules and I love my sleep, but you cant see anything in the room at midday in the middle of summer, you cant even see your hand in front of your face, they block out that much light. Its bliss!
Those have been our two biggest energy savers, and we have solar panels, a loft full of insulation, insulated cavity walls, fancy gas in the double glazing etc etc. Little short of dumping some of the time saving gadgets, I dont think we could save any more energy.
How much money would be saved if we didn’t fetishize owning a bunch of stuff that idly costs more money? How much electricity, since that matters in real terms to me more than your finances.
I remember a long time ago (25 years?) someone 'invented' a device where you plug your TV into it, and it has an IR receiver to go with it, you program it to respond to your TVs power button (on the remote control), and then when you go to put your TV into standby, the plug then turns off too, and when you switch it on it does the opposite. At the time it was being touted as the money saver, and I got the impression (although never actually tested!) TVs back then did draw a lot in standby, so this 'invention' was a legitimately good one. But it didn't seem to really take off, I am assume because standby was rapidly implemented in a way where there is such minimal electrical draw that it would be pointless.
Even better, this is not limited to large power hungry appliances. You can build a surprisingly decent gaming handheld out of an old flagship phone with the help of rooting and some hardware mods [1], basically taking advantage of the low resale value of Android devices.
Still, not a bad idea to run Folding@Home all winter.
So yeah, you're not wrong.
At one point I owned many appliances that leaked heat, and I think I learned to estimate how much power they drew simply by putting my hand on them and feeling how hot they were. I'm not sure I have that superpower anymore. (Obviously it was never that exact, because it depends on many other things like volume, material, isolation, etc. But you can get fairly close for common household things – between a finger and a few heads in size, surrounded by air, plastic case.)
The laptop I'm writing this on consumes around 10W. Kettle 2100W
Making one coffee in the morning consumes enough electricity to power the laptop for the whole workday
The idle power consumption of my home is dominated by the fridge and freezer (around 150W combined). Idle mode of any other devices is a rounding error
I had a couple of these (in fact I probably still have them), from the 2000s - an Intelliplug and Intellipanel - the later being an 8-way plug. I used it for a TV, 5.1 amp/receiver, blu-ray player, Xbox360, Sky+, Wii, and Squeezebox Radio. The Sky+ box was in the "always on" socket so it could record stuff at all times, while the TV was in "if this comes on, turn on everything". I convinced myself I was doing a good thing for the planet and my finances, but I never measured it. Blindly believing it was far preferable to spending any effort on proving I'd been a fool, especially since I needed the sockets anyway - I don't recall the price being that much different to any other 8-way I looked at.
Eco-friendly or not, I'm impressed; detecting power draw and using that as a signal is actually a legitimately clever solution to the problem of wanting to conveniently switch multiple things at once. The only caveat I can think of is that some devices probably don't like being switched at the wall.
But it is a very cool idea.
Also seen that my Hifi Amp draws a good few watts on standby.
We have recurring argument in my house where my partner tells me I should have turned the LED lights off to save electricity and I tell them to close the curtains to keep the heat in. In truth I have no idea which wastes more energy/money
I think it's worthwhile to check your power consumption. If anyone still has not changed their lightbulps to LEDs, please do it yesterday (a change from 40W to 10W is HUGE).
I see the automobile industry taught well.
Don't know if that was before or after the EU.
Programmed a rule in my home automation to turn off that whole socket if it's after 11pm and the lights are off, then back on in the morning. It's around 100 kwh per year, which is more than 30 euros at current energy prices over here.
I'd imagine your router is probably the primary contributor to that 35W.
My router + fiber termination point are using 18W continuous, but that's not included in this 35, they're somewhere else in the house. The box here is only a TV decoder.
How much to replace a broken socket? Probably about £100 by an Electrician!
The guy from the energy savings trust also mentions "Even the standby light on your TV takes up energy"! An LED? Seriously? So the crazy advice is switch the TV off at the wall instead. What happens then? Every time you switch it on you have to wait for longer for the PC inside it to boot properly and connect to the network, using much more energy than a tiny LED!
Last year I got a thermal camera to help with some insulation in my old house, but it's great for literally seeing this standby usage. The TV, when off, is around 2 degrees above ambient.
The author of the article laughs at the mention of the VCR, but doesn't acknowledge that we might be wasting more energy with newer gadgets.
Every "IoT" device that runs of mains power seems to have very inefficient power supplies, because they are regularly warm to the touch even when doing nothing: Smart bulbs (by far the worst), Alexa, Fire/Google TV sticks, etc.
One explanation might be that it's a side effect of designing them to make their development and production cost effective.
In that regard, I wonder to what extent consumer protection regulations would be helpful e.g. clamping down on the production of consumer electronics that consume certain wattage per hour without any proper justification.
Are you saying the device itself is warm or the power supply? If it's the device it can't be caused by an inefficient power supply because the supply is external.
As for my Google TV: the PSU is integrated, so I can't tell.
Maybe some. On the other hand, the Hue sitting here is cold to the touch when not emitting light and is drawing about 0.4W right now--I checked.
WiFi-connected ESP32 draws about 140 mA. esp8266 will be similar. They are both 3.3V devices.
3.3 * 0.140 = 0.46
Your light bulb's esp8266 (or a similar chip, zigbee is 2.4 GHz as well) is fully powered.
With a switching power supply and proper light sleep you should see about 1/10 of that.
API reference: https://docs.espressif.com/projects/esp8266-rtos-sdk/en/late...
Sleep impact: https://github.com/chaeplin/esp8266_and_arduino/tree/master/...
- large CRT
- VCR
- DVD player
Given the ancient appliances, and how infrequently we watch TV, it does actually pay off to disconnect them via a surge protector.
The proper thing to do is to check them with a kill-a-watt or similar, and make the decision on a case-by-case basis.
Plus it’s fun checking your various devices.
E.g. a desktop PC might clock in at 100W when unused depending on the components, so if it’s not necessary hibernating it at night is a significant gain (if it has a working hibernate mode) for very little inconvenience.
There are also devices which you only use once a month but sleep in at a few watts, completely unnecessarily.
100W when unused! What on earth causes that? My laptop draws 100W under full load.
- GPU at about 11-15W
- Fans on motherboard and case 7-10W
- Disks (1 HDD, 2xSSD): 5-10W
- Peripherals (keyboard, mouse, headset, ...) 2-5W
- CPU 5-15W
I can imagine a scenario with additional peripherals, beefier GPU, more PCI cards, more disks could absolutely reach upwards to 100W.
It's just that no one really cares about power usage on a desktop because its plugged in and doesn't cost all that much if you turn it off while not using it. I think modern windows may even try to automatically suspend the system to actually turn the gpu and fans off.
Does your PC get that hot?
You would not, 100W not that much heat unless the room is very hot or it’s blown straight into your face (but even middling desktops tend to have very large fans, and will generally send the heat away from you, either towards a wall or to the ceiling directly).
100W is about what a human produces at rest.
The cost of turning up some "microCPU" vs. the cost of the led + sleeping sycles. The pollution cost of slowing down, stoping, driving again vs. stoping on bumpers. The costs of keeping the same old refrigerator vs. energy savings during 5 years.
>How much to replace a broken socket? //
So, waste electricity because the 5¢ socket switch might break?
What's wrong with turning things off when you're not using them.
I personally log the metrics to Prometheus so I can graph them over time with Grafana. For groups/devices that don't have a dedicated power meter attached I sometimes do a run where I switch off all the breakers and then turn them on one by one. The live power usage output is really useful to quickly determine how much easy group is using.
Wrote a small script to regularly ingest the data into SQLite, then use Grafana to plot the results :)
My meter is one of the blinking ones yeah.
I'm not sure if I have the patience to add sensors though.
One interesting aspect of the meters is I think they talk over zigbee protocol, but I'm not sure how to tap into that. I think the in-home display uses it though to display "real time usage".
The API I use gives 30m resolution which seems ok enough.
Other people have suggested https://data.n3rgy.com/consumer/home as an alternative as well
As long as your smart meter is DCC connected they should work
Journalists who write those articles should be banned from being published forever.
That's reading way too much into it, don't you think?
>You ate too many avocadoes, you didn't make your own coffee, you didn't turn your TV off at the wall
The "article" literally says the savings is £30 a year. Nobody thinks that's the reason they're poor.
>Journalists who write those articles should be banned from being published forever.
In other words, money saving advice should be banned because they might be spewing "corporate PR to shift responsibility"?
I don't think that, no. Or I wouldn't have posted what I posted. Corporations spend an immense amount of money on PR, and a lot of it goes on "perception shifting". As an example, in the early 2000s Shell spent $100m inventing the idea of a "personal carbon footprint" so that people would focus on the environmental impact of you using 20 plastic straws a year instead of Shell burning 400m barrels of oil. It worked brilliantly.
The "article" literally says the savings is £30 a year. Nobody thinks that's the reason they're poor.
£30 a year on this. £50 a year on something else. £20 a week on a phone. £5 a week on coffee. And suddenly the papers are full of "Poor people can't afford a house because they waste their money on things!" People do believe it.
In other words, money saving advice should be banned because they might be spewing "corporate PR to shift responsibility"?
Yes. Money saving advice when it's a paltry amount that won't cause a shift in your circumstances is essentially useless, especially if the root cause is some corporation trying to get out of being responsible for their actions. In this case, electricity companies are making record profits and increasing prices far in excess of inflation. The media should focus on that, not whether or not someone is using 20kWh on making LEDs stay on.
I'm not denying "perception shifting" doesn't exist, just that claiming that "Every article that states you can save a small amount of money by doing something" is "corporate PR" is a little too broad. This article has problems for other reasons, but claiming that an energy conservation NGO is acting in bad faith by telling people to conserve energy is a stretch.
>£30 a year on this. £50 a year on something else. £20 a week on a phone. £5 a week on coffee. And suddenly the papers are full of "Poor people can't afford a house because they waste their money on things!" People do believe it.
So you're against money/resource saving techniques being promulgated because it's ammo for the "millennials are poor because they're eating avocado toast" crowd? That seems like an overly "we must win at all costs, anyone that helps the enemy is an enemy" way of looking at things.
>Yes. Money saving advice when it's a paltry amount that won't cause a shift in your circumstances is essentially useless, especially if the root cause is some corporation trying to get out of being responsible for their actions.
I agree this article is dumb because the savings is only £30, but jumping to the conclusion that it must be part of some PR campaign seems premature.
> In this case, electricity companies are making record profits and increasing prices far in excess of inflation.
source?
> The media should focus on that, not whether or not someone is using 20kWh on making LEDs stay on.
In this case "the media" isn't even involved at all. The OP is a blog post from a private citizen, and the "article" it's referencing is from an energy conversation NGO. While I think it might be worth pointing out energy companies profits, that's not really part of the NGO's mission.
I have an old TV that consumed ~290 watts. Similar TVs today consume around 70 watts, say 25% for simplicity.
Variable rate electricity tariffs are ~30p/kWh at the moment.
At ~4 hours of TV a day (I guess more common for older households)
290W * 4 * 365 = 423.4kWh = £127 @ 30p/kWh
vs
70W * 4 * 365 = 102.2kWh = £30 @ 30p/kWh
So a £400-500 TV pays for itself in 5 years.
As an aside, WA is awesome at units. You can simplify to: 10W years * 0.3 €/kwh.
Battery-powered devices (which include both laptops and mobile phones) are notoriously frugal with their power usage, since they have a severely limited power budget (even the biggest laptop batteries are limited to 100Wh because of the FAA, and mobile phone batteries are also limited by their physical size), and they are also compared on that power usage (you see on review sites things like "with the screen at half brightness and playing a nice movie, the battery lasted N hours..."). Wall-powered devices, on the other hand, are much less limited; the biggest restriction would be in places with 10A wall plugs at 110V (that's the case where I live, though "110V" is what the public calls it but it's actually 127V), and that's already over 1kW with no time limit. So wall-powered devices tend to not optimize their power usage (standby or otherwise) as much as battery-powered devices.
Mobile phone chargers really don’t use much energy at all. So these can be left plugged in.
How old is your TV?
EU regulations state that devices > 2013 must must not consume more than 0.5 Watts in standby or in off mode
9W is an egregiously high amount, maybe there's some setting or something that's keeping your device awake to be sapping 9W constantly?
EU regulations state that devices > 2013 must must not consume more than 0.5 Watts in standby or in off mode
Because apart from light escaping by your windows, almost all that energy is turned into heat, and if it wasn't there, you'd have to heat up your home more.
If you have a heat pump, it will generate about 3W of heat from 1W of electricity, so it's 3 times more expensive to heat with standby devices that with your heat pump.
If you heat with gas, it's much cheaper per kWh than electricity, but I'm not sure what the ratio is.
(I am not talking about using it in reverse / heat-pump ONLY)
"There are smart plugs you can buy which will let you check everything is turned off from your phone".
How much power do the smart plugs use to listen on wifi?
I suspect that it would be more cost effective to worry about the energy consumption of Windows update than to worry about a smart plug.
It's just a replay of the carbon footprint playbook.
Same way that companies that produce a lot of waste are weirdly keen on "everybody doing their bit" with recycling: https://www.treehugger.com/shell-oil-preaches-personal-respo...
Or the way that jaywalking was turned into a crime by the motor car companies: https://www.grunge.com/721704/the-truth-about-how-jaywalking...
Or the way poverty/homelessness is framed: https://www.marketplace.org/2012/10/05/personal-responsibili...
It also helps remove personal politics from the equation if everyone already sort of agrees we should be mindful as a standard sentiment. The fact that we have folks whose identity is tied to pollution, to the point where we had people at rallies going “drill baby drill!” barely more than a decade ago, says a lot. Remember: the GOP created the EPA. They used to be more openly supportive of conservation.
The truly responsible parties love the fact that millions of Americans are going to bat for their “right” to trash and pollute our country.
This is a failure of state's energy policy, trying to pass the blame on regular citizens
Ended up knocking something like $800/year off of his energy bill.
That's not to say that certain modern devices aren't highly efficient in standby, but to call this a fraud just doesn't seem right at face value.
With recent Danish prices fluctuating between €0.5 and €1 per kWh, i have been going through my devices, and there were a few of them that surprised me.
I have a couple of Sonos speakers, and apparently every Sonos speaker draws 3-6W while idle/standby (https://support.sonos.com/s/article/256?language=en_US). Having 4 speakers means about 20W idle power consumption, which amounts to 175 kWh/year (14.5 kWh/month), and even at €0.5/kWh, that's €7 per month just keeping speakers on standby.
Another "hidden source" of power draw is a PlayStation. While it's fairly cheap keeping it on "standby" (6-8W), streaming media from it takes about 90W. For comparison an Apple TV uses between 3 and 7W (https://www.apple.com/environment/pdf/products/appletv/Apple...) for the same.
Normal prices are around €0.35/kWh, but since the Danish electricity grid is based on renewables, with backup power being generated mainly by natural gas, that means when natural gas prices go up, so does electricity prices.
Combined with freak occurences of low rainfall in Sweden and Norway during 2021, meaning less hydroelectric power, as well as an unusual period of very little wind along the Danish west coast in august/september, meant that most of the winter has been using a lot more "backup power" than usual.
Solar is of course an option, but considering that the southern parts of Scandinavia is about as high up north as Canada, the sun usually doesn't shine when we need it (the sun rises around 9:00am and sets around 4pm during winter, with an impressive 19 hours of sunshine during all of December)
As i'm typing this, 57% of our power is being generated by renewables, and the current price is €0.46/kWh. The highest price in April has been €0.63/kWh, but on March 23rd it was €0,71/kWh, on March 14th €0.79/kWh, on March 9th it was €1.00/kwH, and on March 8th it was €1.12/kWh. It was even higher in february.
All of the above prices are "hourly spot prices" from 18:00 - 19:00, so the average 24 hour price will be lower, usually around the €0.5/kWh mark, though in february that was closer to €0.7/kWh.
I measured this (at the wall socket) over the years, and my findings are below.
For battery-powered devices, disconnecting the charger once the battery is full does nothing, other than to cause the battery to be discharged more rapidly than it would be otherwise. For battery health, it's best (if possible) to set a 'start recharging' threshold at 90% or so, but that's mostly a device-lifetime issue, not a power consumption issue.
For 'mains-powered' devices with a 'soft power-off', like many modern coffee machines, microwaves, etc. etc., the power draw in 'idle' mode is truly insignificant. You may have an atypical (broken?) device, but other than avoiding some transistor whine, you truly don't gain anything by powering these off. For devices like printers, monitors and TVs, I've never seen any 'idle' power consumption that was even noticeable.
Some 'always-on' devices do have significant power requirements. Like: your set-top box (since it needs to records the programs you scheduled), your modem and/or media converter, and your fridge. With these: it's always measure, inquire and replace as needed/possible.
For me, my fridge is as efficient as it gets, the fiber-to-Ethernet box from my ISP draws minimal power anyway and my Mikrotik router and APs are pretty power-efficient as well (like, 4 hours runtime on a tiny UPS). The rest goes mostly to my heat pump (which also powers my boiler), and in the summer months, this always offset by my solar panels, unless cooling requirements get way out of hand.
Then again that is acceptable to me. Recently realised that leaving it on overnight at 150W idle isn't the best of moves though so now using sleep. Still not quite clear to my why it is idling that high for relatively modern gear.
Everything that drains considerable power is already on a switchbox. It's just the way it is, a smart house saves a lot of power but it costs some too.
Still, we've come a long way. 100W used to be one lightbulb. Now I can run my whole house on that.
The TV in standby is included though. And yeah it's measured. I have a Shelly EM2 connected to home assistant.
I don't use cable.
https://www.wisial.com/product/vx-2030-065/
"The VX 2030 is a location feeding in-house amplifier"
Did your service say the same quality after you unplugged it? Did that of other people in your building?
It seems weird that they would "install" this in your residence.
That's approximately equal to 3hrs worth of minimum wage work (£9.50/hr), and people are that desperate? But it makes sense when you realise that the median wage in the UK is ~£24k/yr...
I don't think it's about income change so much as what income bracket you fall into to begin with. An upper-middle-class person with a stagnant income won't worry about £30/year. But people living in relative poverty (a huge segment of the population) will regardless of how the economy is going.
That's until 2015 and doesn't even take the recent energy hikes into account.
People living under bridges would scoff at that much less the population of an affluent, technologically and image obsessed culture like the UK.
So learning about them is important or you can't make any adjustments.
And so on... but really: how many such adjustments can you make? And how much inconvenience will that cause?
Apparently going without 24,499 times would mean you have enough to put down a deposit for the average first time buyer in London.
Him saying that he will save some money. Let it be those 30GBP a year. I asked how much will it cost to change the switch when it actually breaks from this constant clicking.
He stopped turning off the TV.
The MTBF of the switch was probably 30k cycles.
30k cycles / 365 days / ~4 cycles a day (morning news, evening) is ~ 20 years of clicking.
Let's say TV is in standby 20h per day. So ~ 146 000h * 0.3W will be ~ 44 000Wh or 44kWh.
44kWh * £0.16 or so equals to ~£10.
This obviously won't save the planet or my wallet, but helps me with being mindful at least.
Ahh, my electricity bill in Germany must be lying then. Good to know!
I mean you would have to compromise on the environment a bit but it's by no means impossible to generate a ton of cheap electricity. It's not some lost art like Greek fire or Damascus steel.
Bizzaro because the left desperately wants to redistribute the very thing it's attempting to shut down, as they probably haven't considered that energy underpins all the wealth we have. And the greenies - who are nearly universally left wing also - probably will shout loudly when people are shivering in their homes and not getting enough to eat. And never blame themselves.
But the real blame for this lies at the feet of politicans, blue and red, who have allowed these loud eejits to dictate energy policy: shutting down nuclear plants, subsidising intermittent energy without (the necessary and) even more significant investments in energy storage. Using green credentailism as a vote winner and nothing more.
Now, I still leave it on, because turning a power adapter on and off 365 times a year may also render it useless after a while. I was actually thining about this recently, and whether I should use the Shelly to turn it off automatically, but did not reach a conclusion so far.
One trouble is that energy consumption is noisy. I remember replacing all the incandescent bulbs in my house (circa 2002) with compact fluorescent bulbs, expecting a few dollars a month savings, but given the fluctuations of the bill those savings were invisible.
A few years later I was involved a project that involved evaluating the effectiveness of improvements in building energy efficiency at a large university and that turned out to be pretty difficult. We tried modelling the energy consumption of buildings based on the weather and found there was still a large residual of what seemed like random variation that typically dwarfed the effects of energy improvement upgrades. It could be that our model wasn't a good model, but it turns out to be very hard to prove that the energy and money savings advocated by the likes of Amory Lovins are real, so that's one reason why people don't invest in them.
I suspect this is probably true of modern devices with modern power supplies.
No doubt if you've got a house full of 10+ year old gadgets then they possibly have more inefficient power supplies.
Its likely worth considering modernising old kit because they'll be power-hungry during active use too, which will likely cost you a lot more than the £30 a year you'll save by turning them off overnight !
Not to mention things like games consoles which update themselves and their installed software while in standby mode - that's more hours of time saved. All for the low low price of £30pa.
Realistically I could buy smart plugs or ones with a timer, but that's more cost (probably more than £30), more complexity, and they'll probably cause at least one ungraceful shutdown which I'd rather not have to deal with. And the last thing I want is more discount IoT garbage using my internet to participate in a DDoS because the now bankrupt manufacturer left telnet on and forgot to change the password from "admin/admin".
The cable box uses more power when idle than a smartphone uses peak, and that doesn't include the display!
As important as they frame the DVR I don't think I've known anybody who has cable who really uses the DVR.
But I think "everyone" already knows that standby devices are a convenience that one should strive to avoid, the current fight is between people who insist on unplugging the USB charger vs those who refuse to do so. On this battleground, I think I see a strong case of perfect as enemy of the good: "refusers" are likely to react to pressure by ignoring the issue completely and might easily miss out on meaningful low hanging fruit.
I think I'm currently on pace to save about 2 kWh/day with my new computer though, so that's something at least.
Of 100 devices around your house, there might be only two with unreasonable standby power. But those two will be costing you significant amounts of money.
For example, I found my oven clock was using 15 watts. The oven is 20 years old, so over those 20 years, the clock (which I never use anyway) has cost £762 (at today's electricity prices). For that I could have bought a new oven!
Other surprising high usage devices:
* Audio Amp (on, but silent - 45 watts).
* A power strip - 10 watts.
Nearly all other appliances were < 1 watt on standby/idle, as is required of many new devices by European law.
10 Watt standby does not sound unplausible I found that my subwoofer of a very well known brand consumes about 6 Watts in standby, and our old Roomba is very hungry when on standby, too.
Get a device to measure power consumtion for a 15 Euros/Dollars, find the energy hogs, and give the device to friends and relatives. This will not save the world, but you WILL find some pontential for saving energy.
A few timers on other devices to turn off bluetooth speakers overnight. Over the ten years I lived there it was a decent saving.
Nah; while the species as a whole is fine to grind forward without a care, I’m all in full speed ahead.
Leaving my lights on in empty rooms, generating all the one time use waste; front row seats to the apocalypse sounds metal af.
Not just replacing sockets or cables, but is not true that (electronic) devices have a longer live if they are always plugged in?
Are electronic components happy now with the constant power on/off cycles?
You really think your time is worth so much that taking 10 seconds extra for plugging/unplugging a device is worth even considering?
> Not just replacing sockets or cables
Never happened to me once in over 3 decades. Both sockets and cables usually have a longer lifespan than any of your appliances.
> Are electronic components happy now with the constant power on/off cycles?
Depends entirely on the design of the device and the components used.
The notion stems from the olden days of analogue devices, which indeed often didn't like being power cycled. Turning appliances on and off twice a day, though, doesn't affect the lifespan in the slightest.
16 pence / kwh is pricy I think. Thats around $0.2/kwh whereas the US average is around $0.13... so around 50% more expensive in UK vs US.
The appliances don't have very efficient power supplies that convert the input voltage (e.g. 230V or 120V) down to the single digit voltages used by the clocks and LEDs. It's simply not a concern for devices that usually consume power in the kW range when operating.
The simplest way to save power is to literally just pull the plug after use. It's not even much of an inconvenience either if the plug is reasonably close to the appliance.
So don't turn off your OLED when you find it using some power in standby.
i was considering confronting her and putting in a kill-a-watt and paying her directly the couple bucks a month my standby devices used in power, but i figured that wasn't worth it.
There's a range of devices that consume practically nothing when they are in standby mode, these include:
- Phone chargers (0 - 1W)
- Projectors (0 - 1W)
- TVs (0 - 3W for the ones we have)
- Laptops (3 - 4W for the ones we have)
- AV amps e.g. Denon (2W)
- Coffee Machine e.g. Jura (4W)
- Printers (0 - 1W)
- Amazon Echo Show (4W)
- Presumably the Echos without a screen but I haven't tested them
There's some devices that you have to keep running, but will cycle, these are typically fridges and freezers.
- Pretty much all around 1W sleep
- 2 year old full height fridge - peaks at 49W for 7 minutes ever 30 mins or so
- 2 year old full height freezer - peaks at 75W for 10 minutes ever 45 mins or so
- 1 year old chest freezer - peaks at 76W for 12 minutes every 30 mins or so
- 10 year old half height fridge - peaks at 66W for 30 minutes ever 120 mins or so
- 2 year old half height wine fridge - load isn't smooth, spikes and goes back down, average of about 100W for 10 minutes every 60 mins or so
- 10 year old combined full height fridge and freezer - 110W for 17 mins every 50 mins or so
Then there's some things that can be reduced:
- I usually walk away from my laptop and leave it running. The external monitor goes to sleep, but the laptop itself continues to use 33W when left like this. If I put it to sleep instead it would go close to 0. Assuming that I leave it like this for 12 hours each evening, that's 0.033kW \* 0.22p/kWh \* 365days \* 12hours = £31.80 - with this change alone I can hit the headline figures
- We have a Virgin Media Box and an XBox One X, I haven't separated their power usage, they both draw in their sleep/standby mode, but together they are using 38W when in standby. Using the formula above, switching them off for 12 hours would save £36.61
- Lights, yes, they are only 0.5W each for the Philips Hue, but we've 32 of them in the kitchen alone. That's 16W in standby, for say an average of 18 hours a day over the year when they aren't being used. £20.56 for the kitchen lights to be "off".
Where it does make sense is people who have a few consoles in the house, leaving them in standby mode (particularly the one where it can download updates in the background), or just walking away from their computer and not putting it to sleep properly. Switch it off instead and you'll save the headline figures easily.
(edited for formatting)
The Xbox Series X has two modes
- Instant On (uses about 10-11W in standby) - Energy Saver (uses about 1-2W in standby)
I think it defaults to "instant on" which is ludicrous. Energy saver mode is better, and still supports downloading updates if required.
I mean, I can tell you I drank orange juice this morning when in fact I didn't. So it's misinformation. But it's not harming you to believe me.
If you tweeted that turning off your Apple devices would save 30£ a year, for example, and other people started picking up on it, Apple would complain and it would become political. Twitter exclusively hunts political deviation; they're not even nipple-hunters like the other platforms.
edit: even its search for threats/abuse seems to be modeled on the "Zero Tolerance" policies of suburban schools in the '90s-'00s. Posting finger-guns might get you deleted like it would have gotten a second-grader suspended.
A better version might be tonhave peoole look at what they have in their home thats using electricity and why.
A quick way to #saveenergy at home is to turn off tablets, laptops and consoles as soon as you stop using them, and ideally unplug them.
This is a big potential #energy saver and could save you up to £30 a year.
> aren't tagged as misinformation
The only misinformation I see here is up to £30 a year as households would save more than £30 a year by doing this.