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Comment by iSloth | Hacker News Reader

Strange, I've had a very different experience to the author of this, I've actually got a similar spreadsheet I may clean-up and post to show another view point, however in summary.

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.

---

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.

https://imgur.com/a/l4xMwbo

View on HN

I have some questions about your figures:

- 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.

I would interpret these devices as being in a low-power usage mode where we wouldn't expect high power draws, rather than literally a 'standby mode'. A clock certainly falls in this category. A fridge if it hasn't been opened in hours and has good insulation could even fall here as well overnight, etc. Sure there are power spikes but the important thing is the amortized consumption.

But you cant turn off your fridge at the wall so what's the point in measuring it?

Measuring your fridge is important as it could point to a bad compressor or bad seals.

Your fridge compressor shouldn't be running 24/7, and it should mostly be on standby until temperature rises.

The point is measuring the consumption of a device while you do not need it and it is not performing any meaningful work.

Your fridge is never in that state. Even when the compressor is not working, the fridge is still functioning and performing work. It is sensing temperature and pressure and time and then making decisions based on those inputs.

Your laptop is not performing meaningful work when it is updating while you are away. It can do that in the background while you look at cat pictures.

> the fridge is still functioning and performing work. It is sensing temperature and pressure and time

I believe most fridges use bimetallic thermostats to control a relay to power the pump. And they don't sense pressure or keep track of time.

Have you ever tried to start a super old fridge or AC that you unplugged without waiting the full 3 minutes before plugging back in? It sounds like a diesel truck shutting off in your kitchen.

Modern fridges absolutely keep track of pressure and time.

No, I admit I've never powercycled a fridge nor ever seen a reason to.

Can you explain the mechanism by which a fridge unplugged then replugged a minute later sounds like a diesel truck? The compressor pumps aren't continuous duty, they spend most of the time powered off anyway.

edit: I did some web searching and the only mention of wait times before plugging in a fridge I can find is waiting a few hours before plugging in a fridge if it was stored on its side. Unless you're also flipping your fridge over when you power cycle it, I don't understand why there should be any problems.

It's not specific to fridges, you'll find more results looking for AC/compressors in general: https://skeptics.stackexchange.com/questions/4695/do-air-con...

Depends on whether or not you have a fancy 'smart' fridge, in which case it could very easily be in a state where it is consuming power without performing any meaningful work. A lot of these IoT devices, while low power vs a traditional PC, are not efficient.

Measuring standby power matters where the alternate option would be to unplug the device or use an extension cord with a power switch instead of relying on an active but low-power state.

Sure, for things that you have the option to do that with and you don't mind the hassle. In cases where that isn't an option (i.e. in the case of a smart fridge) or you're not going to do that, it's still useful to know how much idle/sleep power a device consumes as you might want to either modify the device, replace or get rid of it.

Yeah. The author is way off here.

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.

Really depends where in the world you are. In the UK / EU there are rather strict rules on how much power devices can use in standby.

While an IR camera is a good tool (and terribly fun to use!), not everyone has one. Almost everyone has another tool that can be nearly as efficient though: a hand.

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.

In a net heating environment, this is less of an issue than otherwise immediately obvious. A small idle electronic device making a consistent amount of heat just helps heat the house. If electricity is very expensive it would make sense to try and track down the offenders however.

Hopefully you have another heating system that's more efficient than direct electricity, though!

How can any electric heating system be more "efficient" than an inefficient appliance? Inefficiency in an electrical appliance is nothing more than a measure of how good that appliance is at turning electricity into heat.

A heat pump?

A heat pump. Instead of using power to heat a room, you're using a (relatively) small amount of power to move heat from outside into the room.

I had this same thought at one point and eventually learned of heat pumps. Heat pumps move heat from one spot to another, ie from outside your house to inside your house, or the other way. The point is, they move more energy than they consume. So that 1kwh of energy turned into heat by an inefficient electrical appliance could have instead been used to move 5kwh worth of heat into your home by a heat pump.

Heat pumps are more efficient than they used to be (at some point the outside air is too cold for them to work efficiently), so the cold climate where I'm from is just now starting to see them included in new homes.

Yes, I've considered getting a heat pump; for one reason and another, I can't.

It doesn't feel right to talk about the "efficiency" of a heat pump system; talk of "1W in gets you 3W out" isn't right, because you didn't magic those 3W out of thin air. It's more like "4W in gets you 4W out". It seems wrong to say that a heat pump system is "400% efficient".

I thought efficiency was a measure of how much of the work[0] going into a machine is transformed into the intended output work. I suppose you could say that this heat delivery machine is inefficient if a lot of the input work is expended on producing torque, or raising heavy stuff. But even that eventually turns into heat; just in the wrong place.

[0] I hope I'm using "work" and "machine" in the technical sense, so that "work" means displacement against a force, and a "machine" is any device for converting work from one form to another. Effiency is well-defined for that kind of machine: it's just the ratio of work in to work out, the output being what you want; so "efficiency" intrinsically depends on what your intentions are for your machine. .

The efficiency is higher than input because the electricity is only used to transfer heat from one spot to another. This is when the gas gets compressed, to get to the condensing stage at the high pressure. (+after burn for optimal efficiency)

All heaters are 100% efficient in a closed system. However, your house is not a closed system. It’s a spatial region of an open system. In this context it makes sense to talk about efficiency as being lower or greater than 100%.

I wish this were made evident to the hoteliers with bar fridges kept in sealed cupboards...

> It doesn't feel right to talk about the "efficiency" of a heat pump system; talk of "1W in gets you 3W out" isn't right, because you didn't magic those 3W out of thin air. It's more like "4W in gets you 4W out". It seems wrong to say that a heat pump system is "400% efficient".

Those 3W didn't come out of thin air, it came from outside air.

1W of energy going into the heat pump causes 4W of heat energy to get moved from outside your house to the inside of your house.

That's the key thing to take note of. Traditional resistive heating works by turning electrical energy into heat energy directly. Heat pumps move heat energy the same way an A/C unit does, it just moves it the other way.

Essentially, a heat pump is just an A/C unit with the evaporator and the condenser flipped.

> you didn't magic those 3W out of thin air.

No magic, but you are pulling those 3W out of the outside air.

You can use the industry term 'Co-efficient of performance' to avoid any possible ambiguity, but it's just the same thing with a different name.

If your electricity comes from natural gas, it would be more efficient to burn the gas on-site for heat than to burn it to generate electricity, distribute the electricity, and then turn it back to heat.

Yes...ish.

However, consider the greater performance scales with generators combined with the amount of useful heat that one gets out of a heat pump can be better than converting the natural gas to heat locally - even with losses on the grid.

The key is that a heat pump doesn't convert electricity to heat (as a resistive heater) but rather moves heat from one spot (outside) to inside with great efficiency.

Yes, but the comment I'm replying to is about resistive heating from inefficient appliances.

Most efficient to burn the gas for electricity and use that to power a heat pump.

It'd be far simpler and more efficient to use a reciprocating engine to drive a heatpump via a rotating shaft. As a bonus, you could capture the exhaust from the engine with a heat exchanger and use that to heat the house as well.

The others mentioned heat pumps but I'll mention that the person you replied to never said "electric" and is likely referring to gas heating.

Another one of my "came across this in YouTube" things (started with the design of a hurricane lantern) Why Heat Pumps are Immensely Important Right Now - https://youtu.be/MFEHFsO-XSI

The key is the Coefficient of performance https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coefficient_of_performance

In addition to what other people are saying, there's also district heating: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/District_heating Heat can be generated efficiently in some centralized location (from geothermal heat, power plant waste heat, solar, or whatever) and then distributed to nearby homes.

There's lots of ways to heat homes in ways which use way less than 1 joule of electricity for 1 joule of heat.

If you had a heat pump, it would be more effective to run that for sure.

How can heating be inefficient?

By generating only 1 joule of heat per 1 joule of electricity used. There are lots of much more efficient ways to heat homes.

Besides the matter of heat pumps which others have covered, there is also the matter of how good your heating system is at getting heat to where you actually need it.

A PC under your desk will keep your toes warm, and maybe with warm toes you don't really mind the rest of the house being at 10 C / 50 F. With such space heater, you can turn down the thermostat for the entire house and only heat the parts you care about most. Furthermore there are radiative space heaters which direct infrared energy to a specific part of the room using a reflective dish, instead of heating the entire room using convection. In large rooms, radiative space heater can keep you feeling warm while using much less energy than a heatpump would require to heat the whole room.

In the summer though heating the house is a bad thing. Either you are making your house hotter or you're making the air conditioner work harder to remove it.

In most of the world electrical heat is about 3x as expensive as the next cheapest heating (gas, coal, oil, heat pump or wood)

Even better, just go to a pawn shop or ebay and get a used current clamp meter for cheap. Then pull the cover off of your circuit breaker box in your house and check the current draw on each and every wire.

My local library has them available to check out for free! The payback period for buying a Flir camera to do your own energy audit is likely long, but checking one out is pretty reasonable.

> Almost everyone has another tool that can be nearly as efficient though: a hand.

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.

Speakers are notoriously a specific case where power actually does get used in standby, so it doesn't really contradict the original article. For instance, an old BBC News article (not the one published today that probably triggered this submission) listed "TV on standby" as using lots of power but was actually including various peripherals including powered on external speakers. I would expect turning those off and leaving the TV on would use almost no power. If, as parent comment says, even the TV/monitor is using significant power, then that's a lot more interesting.

> I would expect turning those off and leaving the TV on would use almost no power

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.

Idle or in standby? EU regulations state the maximum standby power is 0.5w.

You do, however, typically need to set “low power standby” or whatever in the options somewhere - it’s usually not enabled by default - the default is usually to turn the screen off but leave everything else running. Mine drew about 5W in “normal” standby, and is immeasurably low (from our household inverters - I live off grid) in low power standby. It takes about 10 seconds to boot - no big deal.

> You do, however, typically need to set “low power standby” or whatever in the options somewhere - it’s usually not enabled by default

i had the opposite, i had to disable the low power standby (which was on by default) so i could wake it over the ethernet or via HDMI-CEC

I believe the low power mode is required (by UK law, at least) to be enabled by default. It's pointless otherwise as almost nobody will go and enable that mode.

It may be a specific case, but then the article title should be "No, you can’t save £30 per year, unless you happen to have speakers like most people..."

But there are other things around as well. My old laserjet printer was another offender.

I have electrical heating, so until the summer there's no such thing as wasted electricity.

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.

> In some climates and energy grids, switching from things like incandescent to LED causes a greater environmental impact

How would that be the case?

5x 100W light bulbs is 0.5kW of heat output which your heating system doesn't need to supply.

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.

Yes, but. There are few places that need heating 100% of the year and fewer people living there. During the non-heating hours/days, that's just waste heat.

Depending on where the bulbs are located, they may be emitting into a ceiling cavity that exits the building's envelope more quickly than the location of the heating coil. Some bulbs are actually outside the building.

And of course, the heating system can supply 0.5kW for less than 0.5kW of power with heat pumps or (net including generation and transmission) natural gas.

Resistive electrical heating is typically the most expensive heating option available, at least here in Canada. A heat pump uses much less power to provide the same amount of heat, and fossil fuel heating (gas in the west, oil in the east) is often much less expensive than electric.

This really only applies where the heat is frequently so low that heat pumps cannot function. Antarctica, or maybe Siberia or northern Alaska.

Beyond that, heat pumps are still much more efficient than direct electric heating.

Also, if you have air conditioning at any point in the year, those incandescent lights are just going to make your air conditioner work that much harder.

It used to be the case. The energy cost of production was massively higher in their early days and if the waste heat was used, there wasn't a net energy savings. Not so much anymore, especially when increased lifespan is taken into account (it's at least at parity at this point).

Reminds me of the story of the LED traffic lights that freeze in winter, thus needing an additional heating solution (making them more expensive / error-prone and even less energy-efficient during cold weather): https://www.popularmechanics.com/technology/infrastructure/a...

That was once true but it's no longer a real issue: https://youtu.be/GiYO1TObNz8

If you live in a climate where it's too cold for heat pumps to function, and rely on electrical (resistive) heating instead, the "waste" heat from the incandescent bulbs offsets the power needed for heating almost 1:1. Replacing those with LED bulbs wouldn't reduce your power requirements at all (you'd just run the heaters more) and the LEB bulbs require more energy and exotic materials to manufacture.

Is there such a thing as too cold for heat pumps though? They drop in efficiency, sure, but still beat resistive heating. Modern ones are still going to be 300% efficient down to -20C or so. With a resistive pre heater I don't see how they'll ever not be more efficient than resistive heating.

My heat pump is a Trane heat pump from 2018 and it goes into emergency heat mode when the temps are below 36, which is off and on for most of the winter. I wonder if I should have it serviced to make sure it's working correctly.

It's partially a function of your heating demands. My sister's emergency heat mode would run all the time in her town house. But she installed a giant insulating curtain over one of her leaky sliders and now it almost never needs to run.

That seems more like she improved her insulation, decreasing her heating needs rather than addressing the temperature cutoff for a heat pump.

I still like the heat pump because in the summer my power bill for cooling a 2600 sq ft home is about $50/month, and in the winter I do have a wood burning stove that I can run to heat the house when the temps are below 36. That and recirc mode on the fan unit can keep my power bills to a minimum.

A heat pump with a sufficiently powerful resistive preheater will be at least as energy-efficient in operation as the resistive heater alone, but it's also much more complex, with a correspondingly higher up-front cost and ongoing maintenance requirements. A resistive heater can consist of little more than a solid-state heating element, a blower fan, and a mechanical thermostat; radiative heaters can even dispense with the fan, which is the least reliable part of the system. A heat pump, by contrast, additionally involves pumps, heat exchangers, and volatile fluids under pressure, generally under the management of some moderately complex logic.

Naturally a heat pump is more complex and thus more maintenance intensive, but it's worth the investment/cost in energy savings in any calculation I've seen (they do tend to require more maintenance).

Cost is one factor, but if you live in, say, rural North Dakota, you may not be able to afford the risk that your main source of heat breaks down in the middle of a blizzard and you can't get anyone in to service it for several days… or weeks. Don't discount the value of predictable reliability.

> If you live in a climate where it's too cold for heat pumps to function

Year round? So you mean the polar regions? Because they can work even at -10F. Efficiency is reduced, but they can work. Crappy ones will cutoff earlier though. If you are not in one of the planet's poles, we have seasons so it's better to use LEDs for at least 3/4 of the time (maybe more as even northern latitudes only have a few really severe winter days).

Modern LED lamps are tiny and use very little material. Incandescent bulbs are no longer considered 'exotic' because of how old the tech is, but tungsten was a very exotic material at some point.

If you live in a climate where it's too cold for heat pumps to function, and rely on electrical (resistive) heating instead

That's the point where I'd strongly consider cryptocurrency mining.

You should read up on heat pumps, they are several times more efficient than electrical resistance heaters.

Depends on what other value you get from your “heater”. My PC, running at full whack, draws about 700W, which all gets radiated as waste heat. It’s enough to maintain the temperature in my (well-insulated) living room when it’s 20C colder outside.

Still inefficient, but I guess that's power you were going to draw anyway.

You sure it's drawing 700W? Are you running multiple GPUs or what? Is that a server? Have you measured?

Also, if your rig goes over, say, 400 watts of power it is definitely worth it to get an 80+ efficiency rated power supply. There are quite a few tiers, bronze, silver, gold, platinum, titanium, etc., but that's the equivalent of extra 9's uptime where just the 80+ rating is the first 99%

I doubt they use a non-80+ power supply with their modern high end CPU and GPU seeing as the standard was introduced in 2004, with Energy Star certification requiring it in 2006.

But not only is the efficiency rating important but the specific model’s efficiency curves at cold loads and hot loads, 20%, 50%, and 100% loads. Paying attention to your components and what level of power usage they will be at for most of their usage will dictate what the most efficient specific model of power supply (at a reasonable price point for you). This of course makes reviewing and purchasing power supplies quite complicated.

My personal experience has been that people skimp on the power supply, it's the one area where direct performance isn't affected so the features that the power supply provides are not directly correlated to the overall performance of your machine.

Many people, especially in mid-tier or lower builds where every dollar for price vs performance has been calculated to the decimal point will opt for the cheapest power supply that meets the wattage and connector requirements their particular build requires, efficiency and longevity be damned.

My opinion is that getting a guaranteed 80% power conversion efficiency rating (as compared to, say, a 75% conversion efficiency rating) on a 500 watt PC will save you 25 watts of power over the years that you use it, plus a manufacturer that actually goes through the process of getting the approval will probably have also put a little extra care into their manufacturing process and so probably has a better reliability rating than one that did not.

Unless you are scraping to get any PC together it may well be worth an extra $10 in price variance, all other things being equal, for that piece of mind and minor electricity savings to boot.

My point was, in the past few years I have been buying computers, I have never seen a non-80+ psu. Not that they do not exist, certainly there are unlabeled white boxes for dimes and nickels on the dollar compared to a quality one.

I went out of my way to research my current power supply to make sure that given my usage and components, it would operate in peak efficiency (I believe mine is at nearly 95% efficiency at average load, would need to measure it more thoroughly, it has been a few years).

I feel a power supply is like tires. They are the only thing that actually touches the road(electricity). They are worth paying for something halfway decent, not bottom of the barrel.

I do agree, but I would be shocked to see a non-80+ psu at a reputable store like Micro Center.

True. It's been about 5 years since I built a new computer and so my information apparently is a little but outdated, but a quick search through newegg's cheapest power supplies shows things like this:

https://www.newegg.com/p/1HU-0027-00010?Item=9SIAXE5EGG6813&...

650 watt, no-name non-80+ power supply for $40. That's the sort of thing I'm talking about. There are 80+ rated power supplies in the same price range or 80+ from reputable companies for $10 more but it's still a thing worth looking for when you're a newish builder or if you have any concern for the overall efficiency of your computer.

After all, base 80+ rating still means that for every watt your PC actually gets to use you're converting .2 watts directly into heat. That's not a big deal for a workstation that may only draw 100 watts under load but if you have a beefy PC with 3090s and an overclocked 12 series i9 processor with a lot of fans, you could be burning 100 watts or more just to power the thing, so it would definitely be worth it to go for gold or platinum 80+ rating just to save the money in waste heat and in cooling that waste heat after the fact.

RTX3080 and a 12 core i9-12. Yeah, I’m obsessive about power consumption as we’re off-grid - it’s more like 650W at peak, when running a modern game at 4K on maximums. Doing nothing much it draws about 50W.

Got it. Only reason I asked is that I've seen crazy figures thrown around (specially when PSU sizing) that never matched reality - specially when you look at the claimed cooling solutions. Dissipating 700W is no small feat.

Particularly as I have it on a mini-itx, in a cupboard - the radiator lives outside the case, outside the cupboard. It’s actually proven dead handy, as the weather gets too warm for running the log stove, but too cold at night to not have any heating - so using the waste heat from entertainment to keep the place cosy seems like an efficient approach.

That's kinda the point though, that heat is doing work anyway, and they may not have the ability to use/install a heat pump. Of course it would be more efficient, but for example, my condo has three separate electric wall heaters. Instead of using them, we just rely on our computers to heat our space enough. Works until it is about 4-5C outside.

Someday if I ever get to build a custom house, I plan to install a full 42U rack that is tied into the houses central air to optionally heat the house with the waste heat.

26% of heating in Canada is electric baseboard, much of it in buildings that can't or won't allow heat pumps. https://www150.statcan.gc.ca/t1/tbl1/en/tv.action?pid=381002...

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.

> In some climates and energy grids, switching from things like incandescent to LED causes a greater environmental impact.

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.

Your amp isn’t “doing nothing” it’s just… on. Just because you’re not feeding it a signal doesn’t mean it’s not amplifying.

I've thought about buying an infrared camera, but I've found them to be terribly expensive. Not in scientific terms as they are precision instruments, but in 'I have some money to spend on amazon but this thing has high three figures so I'll buy something else'. Specifically talking about FLIR and the direct competitor I forgot the name.

Are there any affordable cameras that are not completely trash? Low resolution is ok.

Mine is an HTI-19 320 x 240 resolution one that was $233 on Amazon. It's not cheap, but I've certainly saved more than that in electricity from problems it identified in the 2.5 years since I bought it. It works just fine.

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.

The FLIR One or Pro are in the $220-300 range if I remember correctly. They attach to your iphone and use that as the screen an maybe for some processing. In any case it works pretty well for most personal applications you might run across.

Hypothetically speaking you could buy one, find the hot spots, send it back to Amazon.

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

500W of "idle" power consumption is waaaay too high, in my experience. That's my average rate when I have everything on.

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).

We are a family of 5 in Germany, we have a 70€/month electricity bill. 2500kWh per year with one person (me) in home office. 3000kWh with two persons and the kids being more at home.

My house uses about 1500-1800kWh per month. We just bought it though and are working to get it efficient.

How is that possible? Electrical heating / AC?

Unclear. We just got solar panels and are auditing all the energy users now. There were some resistive heaters running we didn’t know about that pushed an extra 500kWh before. I think we got it down to about 1600 kWh. I think with all the he mods we are doing we can get it down below 1000 kWh but it will take time and more efficiency improving.

I would suggest to get a smart electricity meter so you can see "live" power usage. I'm not familiar with resistive heaters, but it appears they are purely electrical, which means they are only 100% efficient. Heat pumps (you can use AC for heating) are >300% efficient.

For reference: my 2 person household uses less than 3000 kWh / year (gas heating and electrical cooking), so even 1000 kWh / month would be a lot imo.

The solar system provides a whole house real time meter so we should be able to track down usage easier. We’ll see. We have two teenagers and a larger house and workshop, so, quite a few variables to figure out. We are converting the whole house to heat pumps. These units are state of the art and hit 370% efficiency.

I’m in the same boat. Electric baseboard heaters are what’re killing us.

To the 500W figure mentioned above, I plugged our little space heater into a kill-a-watt meter and it measured it at 500W/day.

Resistive electric heating is brutally expensive. I’m looking into heat pumps before next winter.

We have a boiler and some resistive heating. We are going with whole house (6500 sqft total) heat pump system. Ends up being several large commercial Fujitsu units that are efficient down to -20F (Colorado weather). We expect to dramatically cut our energy consumption with this move and be totally off natural gas. Combined with the solar and battery system we are getting we should be completely energy independent and net producing electricity which is cool :)

500W/day is a nonsensical unit; I assume you either mean 500W or 500Wh/day (different by a factor of 24)

I agree, 500W is when my 2 TVs, 2 desktop PCs, 2 32 inch monitors, NAS, router, 3 wifi APs and 3/10 lights are on and my fridge, freezer and other miscellaneous non-smart devices are plugged in.

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.

Definitely. Electricity at the current UK price cap is pretty much bang on £2.50 per watt-year, so there are some eye watering annual standby costs in that spreadsheet.

>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.

>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.

> Also, listing fridge as "idle"?

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.

> you can probably turn it off at night when you know you won’t be opening it

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.

I'm pretty sure refrigerators have electric heaters in the door gaskets as well.

Sure, I guess my definition of idle is everyone in the house asleep not using any appliances and having them all in the generally accepted idle state.

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)

Definitions are being stretched all around for this.

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.

how did you get 500w of idle use. that does not make sense. could you please post your table. i have my pc all the time on and some other things and not even close to that.

Agree, 500w of nothing is INSANE in 2022 are you sure. Please list brands.

I don't think it's any one thing that's 500W, it's an accumulation of many devices all doing 20-100W. Lots of modern PCs are 30W+ even when off— like not even on sleep, but on off/standby.

So these numbers don't surprise me in the slightest.

i worked for a electricity meter maker and measured consumption for things in my house and have now meters on most sockets and so on. 500w idle is huge.

How much is the draw of all those ammeters? i.e. the "burden". I'm having trouble finding what that would be for a typical household plug ammeter without avoiding all the "power meters are great" spam sites. I assume it is very small.

i had access to industrial power meters designed to 120A 400V so that is what i used, but the typical household here would not go over 4-7 kw and you can buy cheap digital meters from AliExpress with display and so on they can measure up to 4kw i believe.

I'm using Shelly EM at the entry (for the entire phase), relays with PM at some sockets with interesting devices and shelly plugs at some sockets that need to be easily serviceable (think behind kitchen cabinets, for the built-ins).

The consumption of each of them is below 1W.

Nobody is missing 50w any more because that goes on their BOM as a bigger power brick. I can see this stuff where someone missed an incandescent or hasn't replaced a device in 10 years but really stuff has moved on and cost optimisation is relentless.

Yes it's huge, but not out of the question for some people who go all in on some things in their house.

For example, in my place right now:

  - Unifi rack (some switches, cameras, other PoE stuff) - 335W
  - Servers (home automation, NAS, etc) - 426W

That's all the time, Unifi actually goes up at night when the IR LEDs come on in the cameras.

That's not "idle" use... somebody wasted good money on those labour-saving devices. And they'll write a blog post about it too once they get around to fixing them!

(I write this lovingly yet seriously as absolutely a victim of this exact same dynamic, sitting next to a pile of expensive fans I'm going to use to reduce the noise from my rack... any day now...).

That's still insane. I have a Hue bridge and server at home that together draw less than 50W. Network equipment is also in the range of max 10W per device.

Which modern PC draws 30W when off? When mine is off, the electricity calculator states 0W (the draw is less than it can register).

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.

The specific case I'm thinking of was an Advantech AIMB-274 with a Mini-Box PSU (I don't remember which one). I was evaluating this setup for inclusion in a battery powered mobile robot; in particular we needed to decide whether the computer could be hooked up to the battery full time or if there needed to be a relay in between them in order to preserve the battery when the robot was "off". The answer turned out to be that we very much needed to disconnect the computer.

Admittedly this is not a consumer PC or a "modern" gold/bronze-designated power supply, but I still thought it was pretty significant.

My ASRock B450 Pro4 draws about 3W from the wall if WOL is enabled, which in ASRock's firmware seems to keep all PCI devices (and attached USB devices) powered. 30W seems impossible though, anything not specifically designed to be fanless will almost certainly need to turn on the fan at that power usage (and even fanless might have difficulty dissipating a constant 30W).

Monitors can dissipate a huge amount of power without a fan. The OP blames mostly them, and their stand-by power consumption usually isn't even available to a buyer.

Surely the display panel itself is switched off when on standby, though? Is this a case of not including a separate standby power supply circuit, so that it's the "main" one inside there running at a fraction of its capacity, where it is least efficient?

30W with high end CPU and graphic card in desktop and tons of plugged pheripals and big screen? They have good power management these days but not that good.

Plus many people use electronics build 5-10 years ago which are generally bigger offenders.

It doesn't matter if it is a computer with multiple GPUs for cryptomining. If it's 'off', PCI should be off, etc.

Mine is <100W now. Including a big monitor.

Sure, it'll be a while before I had something cleaned up nicely, however I've added some screenshots to my original post.

I'm wondering too. I actually tested almost all devices at home and the idle power consumption actually quite different from my previous perception. The following are a few I tested: 1. Microwave Oven. ~3W. 2. DECT phone base. ~2W. Extension unit. ~1W. 3. IP phone. ~1W. 4. Cable Modem. ~10W. 5. Routers. ~3W to 20W. 6. Switches. ~1W to 30W. 7. NAS(4Bay). ~40W. 8. Raspberry Pi 3B. ~3W. 9. Chargers/Power adapters. ~0W to3W. 10. WIFI Smart Plugs. ~1W when switch off. ~1.5W when turned out, both no load at all. 11. Set top box. ~15W, on or off. 12. PCs/Laptops. ~3W off, ~5W to 15W on.

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.

Just having air conditioning in the UK clearly puts you in a position with electricity use outside of the normal.

Sure - Completely agree with having the air conditioning or heat pump running, there would be a higher power consumption compared to the average UK property, however this is about idle 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.

Why doesn't every home have a monitor right off the main panel recording current total power draw in a format that is easy to read and interpret? Seems like such an obvious way to control usage. Running around with a power consumpution monitor for every wall socket is all well and good, but might miss a lot of silent leaks.

That would work for the total consumption, but if you notice that that is too high, you will still have to run around with a power consumption monitor to identify the individual culprits. Of course, a display saying "you are currently using 1300 Watts" would be easier than having to estimate it from how fast the wheel on the meter is turning, but replacing every meter everywhere is not the most environmentally friendly thing to do either...

I’d think panel support would logically have a probe per circuit, so you could get the complete breakdown if and when necessary.

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.

Leviton offers what you describe:

https://www.leviton.com/en/products/residential/load-centers

There's an energy monitor with 16 CT clamps included, you put one on each of the circuits coming from the fuse board. 16 is more than enough for most UK houses, which would at least let you know which circuits are consuming the power.

> if you notice that that is too high, you will still have to run around with a power consumption monitor to identify the individual culprits

Or just the good old method of turning things off individually, one at a time.

They do. All new smart meters come with an IHD (In Home Display). It shows real-time use in kWh or £.

> All new smart meters come with an IHD (In Home Display).

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.

I'm assuming, if you're in the US, your IHD wouldn't be displaying in £ either :-)

Let me be clearer. Every new install of a smart meter in the UK is supposed to come with an IHD.

Mine didn't, the meter was installed as part of the house build last year.

Careful what you wish for ...

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.

That is convoluted. Then again, it's Germany. Here in NL most places have a meter that beams usage to your utility, which send me handy montly reports. By default it's only allowed to transmit twice per month, but you can allow it to be done daily or near real time (some energy co's require it, they'll charge you different hourly rates). The privacy around these numbers are guarded: they may only be used to calculate your bill.

> 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 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.

> 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?

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.

> 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.

Using traditional summing electro-mechanical meters assumes that electricity is priced uniformly at all times of day, and encourages over-consumption during times when spot market electricity is most expensive, the cost of which ends up being shifted to those who consume energy at lower spot market price times.

Smart meters allow for time-of-use rates, which are a more economically (and in CO2 emissions) efficient way of pricing power.

They do expose more information about the times of day that individual consumers use electricity to electric utilities, though. A consumer who is concerned about and also is proponent of market based pricing mechanisms could install battery storage to mask their usage profile, and even use it to do energy arbitrage.

> 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.

That's simultaneously terrible and quite neat.

well its bullshit, there are some shitty ones but also some really good ones.

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...)

Yeah I'm confused by this article. I've got a Virgin Media TV box which used 25w while on standby. Maybe I'm doing the math wrong but:

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.

Your math is right, if you're not recording at night then you can switch it off at night (we switch one of ours off at night on a timer)

The math is right but the units are messy. Watts are already energy/time, which is correct for the 25 W figure, but the 219 should be kWh/year.

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".

A good approximation is that 1W of power for a year costs you one Dollar (or Euro) per year.

Those cable TV boxes that they give out are terrible outdated cheap pieces of shite and have notoriously bad power consumption.

Considering it is impossible to know what kind of appliances folks have in their homes the article is odd.

Please do post your full experience, I'd be interested. I saw an article this morning and it spurred me to buy some smart plugs to cut power overnight to standby devices (https://www.telegraph.co.uk/bills-and-utilities/gas-electric...)

Come to think of it, the smart plugs probably draw similar power to the appliances on standby..??

It's OK, there are smart plugs you can use, to cut the power to them.

Smart plugs all the way down.

Most are similar to well-behaved appliances - so low it's difficult to measure. Even more so if they are not wifi.

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.

Sonos devices are also quite power hungry in standby, in the 4-6W range (230v)

https://support.sonos.com/s/article/256?language=en_US

I've had pretty much the same experience as you. Some devices had excellent standy power use, others were really bad (the speakers on my sound system being the worst offenders and using exactly as much power when on standby than when operating and more than my fridge…). The key takeaway here imho is: n=1, monitor your own installation and devices and don't expect there to be either an untapped pool of savings or a well optimised system based on blog posts by other people.

The Keurig is the worst offender... Enormous energy is expended to keep your water hot 24/7.

Very true - To be honest at the point I knew the house consumption and hadn't yet clamped individual devices I had expected to find a single culprit like that, or even a faulty device with earth leakage that was affectively dumping the current for no real purpose.

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.

Mains power switches are a wear item and can withstand like 10-100x less on/off cycles than a simple button that controls some 3.3V gpio on a microcontroller.

A cheap mains power switch from 30-40 years ago had no problem being cycled once or twice a day for 30-40 years without ever failing. This is not a binding constraint.

Either there's not alot of current going across that switch, or it's just a little lucky - just because that one is going strong doesn't mean over half of the same switch hasn't failed in the same application.

Or, if it's really 40 years old, "cheap" could be "really fat and expensive" today.

If you pick up an old "broken" power (audio) amp, the most likely reason for it to be broken is pots - switch - caps - FETs in that order.

Do you have stats on this? I've developed coffee makers and other appliances. Yes, there's often a mode where the boiler keeps warm for some amount of time after the first cup is made. The first cup can take minutes to heat up, and the second is often much shorter. Then there's a certain amount of time where the preheat is left on, and eventually it's turned off if the coffee maker isn't used again. Different models/makes have different algorithms and modes, but this is a common pattern. There are energy conservation standards which also come in to play, so unless we're taking about a commercial machine, I don't think anything current will just keep the preheat on forever.

I wouldn't have believed it either, and yet:

"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...

I keep an electric kettle and Melitta pour-over on my desk at work. It is on when I turn it on, then it is off. The Keurig has always seemed like kind of a bad deal.

I guess you could make a case for this kind of thing in a breakroom or something where it's going to be in use all day, but then again, that's also the scenario where it would make the most sense to just be continuously brewing whole pots of coffee in a conventional drip machine.

Either way, a Keurig in a home, only brewing once or twice a day? The worst.

My keurig would keep it hot for weeks. How much energy that actually wasted, I'm not really sure.

I just got one but the Zojirushi hot water dispenser can keep 4 liters of water hot for 31 - 48 watts or so. What does the Keurig use?

https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B00R4HKIV8/ref=ppx_yo_dt_b...

Zojs are well insulated hot water dispensers, a keurig is a pod-type coffee machine, so I assume it’s just an un-insulated plastic reservoir (though hopefully it doesn’t keep the entire reservoir hot, only the water for the “next dose” for people who can’t cope with waiting 30 seconds for the machine to heat up)

I really wish keurig would just have a big capacitor inside to insta-heat the water beyond what’s possible from mains in real-time. But I guess there’s too much risk of shocky shock.

> I really wish keurig would just have a big capacitor inside to insta-heat the water beyond what’s possible from mains in real-time. But I guess there’s too much risk of shocky shock.

I'm not sure that's an option unless you have a capacitor larger than the device. Heating water takes a lot of energy: let's say we're talking 200mL water (0.2kg), ambient temperature is 20C, water has a specific heat of 4.2kg/kg.C, so that's 67200J.

A Maxwell K2 3000f 3.0v would store a hair under 13500J, which isn't even remotely close, and these things are huge (https://youtu.be/y8tQesYvCig?t=10), heavy (>500g), and each would be a significant fraction of the keurig's existing price.

If you need to strap 5 capacitors to the keurig, danger aside, you've added 2.5kg to the thing, you've strapped a pack twice the size of the brewer, and you've at least doubled and probably close to tripled its price.

My Quooker does too, keep a reservoir permenantly at 110C. It only uses 10W thanks to its insulation though. Surprising Keurig didn't think of that. Then again, they've mostly seemed to have thought about taking your money.

You have measured the apparent power (volt-amperes), not the active power (watts) that you pay for. There can be quite a big difference, especially at standby.

I had a printer that was just spooling up every minute. Was doing some stuff and looked at my power consumption and noticed it.

Super weird, seems like a job didn't finish or something and it was trying to finish printing and just couldn't

I use air purifiers in home and I am trying to do the same. Issue is a lot of the electronics like these honeywell purifiers require user input when turned on or off. Do you know of any tricks around this?

No good solution I've found other than being careful in product purchases.

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.")

Other than modifying the device to provide the missing input? No.

You could also use some ridiculous solution like the switchbot.

Those are some atrocious computer numbers, though. I have a desktop PC with 5.1 speakers and 2 Monitors. Standby is less than 10W (10W being the lowest my device can recognize). 36W? What?

what clamp meter are you using?

I’m using an Owl Intuition, however please don’t take that as a recommendation. I got it cheap on eBay with the network bridge included hence why, but the website UI is truly terrible.

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.

> idle power consumption was about 0.4-0.5kW while everyone was sleeping at night

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.

Damn; and I felt gaudy with my phone, personal desktop, single smart speaker and laptop through work being my only gadgets at home.

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.

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