Standby power consumption

HumberFlyer

Test : Not bad for 8 hours

Magnitio

MouldyOldDough said:

Here we go again
BBC News - ‘Vampire devices’ cost UK households £147 a year

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-61235367 
Incorrect facts
I am surprised that it doesn't accuse the in home display of costing £12 per year to run
I mean that's almost £3 a week or 10kWh a week - way out! 

One of the recommendations is to add a smart plug to turn devices off - in some cases, for example a TV on standby, the smart plug could use more electricity than the device it's controlling! Where do they get these "experts" from?

HumberFlyer

@magnitio said

 

One of the recommendations is to add a smart plug to turn devices off - in some cases, for example a TV on standby, the smart plug could use more electricity than the device it's controlling! Where do they get these "experts" from?

My big TV uses 0.3w per hour on standby. My  TP Smartplug uses 0.1w per hour. So.... doing the sums I can have my TV on Standby, 12 hours a day for 416 days and it will use "one" unit of electricity

Mstty

HumberFlyer said:

Test : Not bad for 8 hours

Not bad with hour water (1.6-1.7kWh) kicking in we use on average 2.5 kWh 12-8.

Average daily use with no heating on is approx 9kWh we both work from home full time. (Details of house below in sig)

Ultrasonic

MouldyOldDough said:

Incorrect facts
I am surprised that it doesn't accuse the in home display of costing £12 per year to run
I mean that's almost £3 a week or 10kWh a week - way out! 

Some of your own incorrect facts there I'm afraid. Or at least my years have more than 4 weeks in them  .

Spending a bit of time to minimise standby power usage is not pointless though.

On TVs I will just mention that it's best NOT to always turn modern OLED TVs fully off since they are designed to sometimes run burn-in protection cycles when in standby.

Magnitio

HumberFlyer said:

@magnitio said

 

One of the recommendations is to add a smart plug to turn devices off - in some cases, for example a TV on standby, the smart plug could use more electricity than the device it's controlling! Where do they get these "experts" from?

My big TV uses 0.3w per hour on standby. My  TP Smartplug uses 0.1w per hour. So.... doing the sums I can have my TV on Standby, 12 hours a day for 416 days and it will use "one" unit of electricity

I was basing it on this assessment:

https://www.briandorey.com/post/kasa-smart-plug-by-tp-link-power-consumption-mod

Even if there are more efficient versions, the payback period could be decades!

jvjack

MouldyOldDough said:

Here we go again

BBC News - ‘Vampire devices’ cost UK households £147 a year

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-61235367 

Incorrect facts

I am surprised that it doesn't accuse the in home display of costing £12 per year to run

I mean that's almost £3 a week or 10kWh a week - way out!

Main man Martin was on radio 5 today in afternoon , He too does not believe the figures about vampire devices given by British Gas.. Said some older devices may use more but says his team are investigating it.

And if he had to give some kind of cost it would be £50 ish. Not £147

underwhelmed_saver

The BBC article does not link to any research or methodology on how these figures were gathered, therefore I'd approach it with a degree of skepticism.

Ultrasonic

Let's do some quick sums...

£147 per year at a typical price cap cost of 28 p/kWh would correspond to a total of 525 kWh per year. This in turn would be an average of 1.43 kWh per day, or the equivalent of about 60 W of continuous 'vampire' power use. My own equivalent use is now about half this but on the face of it this doesn't seem an unreasonable figure to believe that could be common?

QrizB

Ultrasonic said:

Let's do some quick sums...

£147 per year at a typical price cap cost of 28 p/kWh would correspond to a total of 525 kWh per year. This in turn would be an average of 1.43 kWh per day, or the equivalent of about 60 W of continuous 'vampire' power use. My own equivalent use is now about half this but on the face of it this doesn't seem an unreasonable figure to believe that could be common?

Yes, and:

jvjack said:

Main man Martin was on radio 5 today in afternoon ... And if he had to give some kind of cost it would be £50 ish. Not £147

£50 a year is around 20W continuous, which seems fairly low.

Of course it might depend on what you call "vampire"; fridge-freezers, broadband routers, smart speakers and internet-connected washing machines aren't things you'd normally switch off and they're providing a continuous service (OK maybe not the washing machine) so they'll contribute to the cold-and-dark baseload but might be out of scope for the purposes of these calculations.