- 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.

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.

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.

Modern fridges absolutely keep track of pressure and time.

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.

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.

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.

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. .

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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?

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

>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.

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

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

The consumption of each of them is below 1W.

For example, in my place right now:

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

(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...).

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

"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...

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

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

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.

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.