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The BBC ran an interesting piece of advice this morning on saving money from "vampire devices":

"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 have a Smart Plug flashed with Tasmota firmware, it uses 0.3W continuously (£0.73/year) and 0.7W with the relay activated. I'm sure there's smart plug's which use more efficient power supplies and/or MCU. The esp8266 isn't exactly known for being power efficient.

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.

Good ones should manage below 0.1W. But I don't thing many are that efficient. So <1W.

It's interesting - someone looked at their smart plug and it was pulling 1.2W, the cost of which comes to more than some of the devices they might be attached to - assumes saving electricity is your only goal - in that case not necessarily the best bet.

Out of interest, I just checked my Philips Hue smart switch (Zigbee) using my measuring plug. It reported 0.2W.

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