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Comment by disiplus | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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'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.

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.

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 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.

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...).

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