As we mentioned in part 2, the Automated Home’s base line energy consumption is terrible. There’s no point creating all this energy and then throwing it away.
But which are the most inefficient appliances? In an effort to find out I decided to work my way round the house room by room, measuring each device that’s permanently plugged in and powered on.
I’m not claiming these figures are super accurate. I used an earlier version of this Energenie Power monitor to take the measurements. Some device’s consumption varied wildly over time, some may reach a deeper sleep level than I measured at while others measured 0.00 where they were clearly consuming at least some power (if relatively little).
With that said, here’s some of the results that I found most interesting.
The Interesting Stuff
Our 8 year old (and still fabulous) Pioneer Plasma is one of the biggest energy guzzlers in the house at nearly a third of a kilowatt when in use. Thankfully thought it has a reasonable (for its age) 0.9 watt standby.
Our Philips hue White bulbs measure 0.00 when ‘off’ whilst the similar Belkin WeMo bulb showed a 0.7 watt consumption in the same state.
In the study our rarely used HP laser printer topped out at over 700w while in use. It’s standby consumption was hard to measure as it varied a lot, but it’s now unplugged.
The house WiFi was provided by an Apple airport extreme that used a constant 9w.
The bedside PortaPow USB chargers measured 0.00 on standby whilst our newer Anker PowerPort 6 idles at nearly 1 watt.
A 32″ LG TV in one of the bedrooms halved it’s consumption (going from around 120w in use to 68w) by setting energy saver to medium. It’s standby consumption is 0.9w.
Two screens on one of the PCs showed how things have moved on recently. An older 19″ LCD monitor consumes more than 2.5 times the power in use of a contemporary and larger 24″ LED panel (18w vs 47w)
Sony’s PS4 costs next to nothing on Standby whilst the PS3 may cost you around a quid a year.
Sonos & sky Shock
One of the biggest surprises was our Sonos system with some very high standby values. The S5 (Play:5 predecessor) was the highest measuring 8.8w in standby. My readings agree with the official sonos values too meaning our 7 piece system costs almost £40 a year on standby. Au.
We love our new sky Q system (read our review here) but it has a dirty little secret too. It costs almost £60 per year to run the main box plus the 3 minis. I went searching for the official consumption figures for the new sky boxes and here’s the valuable line from the specs…
Total energy consumption in line with Voluntary Industry agreement for complex STBs
Hmmmm.
Scheduled Savings
My son’s bedroom has a lot of kit, including a gaming PC rig with 2 monitors, TV, Sonos etc. We found this system on its own ate 28w with everything in standby. We separated off his network switch and WiFi access point and connected the rest to a SmartThings Power outlet (£45) and set a schedule where it’s only on a few hours each day now.
This makes economic sense with a payback time of around 2 years on the smart switch. much less with something like the Energenie Mi|Home module that’s less than £10 and compatible with IFTTT (once you add the Energenie Gateway).
Other items like this 1.8w Ikea LED hall light costs a little over £2 per year to run 24/7 so adding any form of automation would probably not make economic sense.
Good rule of Thumb
Taking today’s electricity prices (£0.1343 for us currently) then here’s a good rule of thumb to work out a rough annual running costs of a 24/7 device.
Taking its rating in watts and multiply it by 1.2 gives you a rough cost in £’s. For example we measured our Synology 1813+ NAS as using 46 watts…
46 watts x 1.2 = £55 annual running cost
So if the Synology serves us for around 7 years – the time our 2 previous home servers lasted – then this single device will have burnt through almost £400 worth of electricity. Sobering thought.
Low energy Appliances
There are other devices around the home which we couldn’t measure easily – for example a big rack of X10 dimmers and appliance modules in the loft, various central heating components etc.
It’s something very few of us do, but we should all be looking at power consumption figures for the products we buy, especially fridges and freezers – where you should go for A+ or better. things have got a lot better in recent times with retailers showing annual running costs for appliances now.
Fridges and Freezers are more difficult to measure because of the stop / start nature of their motors. In a future part of this review series we’ll look at a high-tech energy monitor that can give you most of this information, including for individual appliance, with out all this hard work…
Energenie energy saving PowerMåler
(698)
£ 16.99
Kjøp på Amazon
Decdeal LCD Display Electricity Usage Power Meter …
(82)
£ 16.99
Kjøp på Amazon
Lowenergie plug-in energy monitor strømmåler …
(297)
£ 11.99
Kjøp på Amazon
Les hele solcereserien …
Gå solcelle 1 – Installere en 4kW PV -matrise hjemme hos det automatiserte hjemmet
Gå solcelle 2 – Kostnader, insentiver og tilbakebetalingstid
Going Solar Part 3 – Jeg handlet i Range Rover for et Nissan Leaf
Gå solcelle del 4 – Jeg måler hver 24/7 elektriske enhet i det automatiserte hjemmet
Gå solcelle 5 – Våre PV -systemer Faktiske generasjonstall etter første hele året
Gå solcelle 6 – Hele første år ‘drivstoff’ kostnader for Nissan Leaf EV – £ 235
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Siste oppdatering den 2021-10-04 / tilknyttede lenker / bilder fra Amazon Product Advertising API
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