'Vampire devices' cost UK households £147 a year:
UK households could save an average of £147 per year by switching off so-called vampire devices.
Vampire devices are electronics that drain a surprising amount of power even when they are on standby.
British Gas research indicates households in the UK are spending £3.16bn annually just for the privilege of leaving vampire devices on standby.
This equates to £147 a year for the average household - the equivalent of two months' electricity charges.
Has anyone got any similar figures for their home countries?
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‘Vampire Devices’ Cost UK Households £147 a Year
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(Score: 4, Interesting) by bradley13 on Thursday April 28 2022, @07:55AM (5 children)
We just built a small but very modern house. Every window has WLAN controlled shutters, for example. Of course, that means that every window has a receiver running 24/7.
Lots of other devices, too. I haven't counted, but I'm sure there are at least 50 devices sucking power all the time. Our base power draw never drops under 200 watts.
There are badly behaved devices. Our mixer gets unplugged, for example, because even when turned off, it draws 75w. Stupid design, and most people won't think to check.
Everyone is somebody else's weirdo.
(Score: 2) by pkrasimirov on Thursday April 28 2022, @09:33AM (1 child)
Essentially this power gets converted to heat. If you use AC to cool down your house you end up wasting even more power.
(Score: 2) by theluggage on Thursday April 28 2022, @02:48PM
Except this is a report from the UK: where I have an old portable AC unit that I typically use on the 2-3 hottest nights of the year - most of the year I burn gas to keep my house warm... so replacing a bit of that with electricity isn't so bad!
If you live in Arizona or Dubai then that's something else - but in the UK, if you need air conditioning extensively then addressing that (improve ventilation, put some external shutters on those heat-trapping K-glass windows that make sense in spring and autumn) would be far more profitable than taking your TV off standby.
It's not like this "standby consumption" issue is wrong and is certainly another good reason for saying no to that internet-connected can opener - it's just not going to make as big a difference as people would like.
(Score: 2, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday April 28 2022, @10:32AM
Personally, I don't mind things drawing power in standby modus. BUT, it should be a good minimum. I have an old senseo coffee machine. Even when turned off it draws 3 watt (and is known to blow/degrade its capacitors due to this after a while in the repair community), so it gets its plug removed from the socket when not used. When buying new devices I always try to find the power used in standby modus, then you notice a 10x difference isn't that uncommon.
But even replacing common things that are being used, like a pump for a floor heating (pretty common in the Netherlands), old pumps draw 50 watts easilly, new models 4/5 watts. It pays off to replace them. An old (dumb) tv we had, replaced by a new one 10x less energy usage (about same size).
(Score: 3, Interesting) by ledow on Thursday April 28 2022, @02:16PM
I got voted down on another site recently because my UK house has a base load of 150W throughout the day and people claimed I was making that up as being TOO LOW.
That includes a fridge-freezer and a smaller freezer, wifi CCTV cameras, routers, media units, NAS units, lighting (all LED), sensors, weather monitors, clocks, a printer on standby, and smart-plugs running off the wifi etc. etc. etc. etc. And I don't even own a TV.
And the vast, vast, vast majority of that? The big fridge-freezer. Even the little one is at peak 160W and its duty cycle means it's almost always off throughout the day.
Turning off everything else (including the washing machine that is plugged in behind itself and the dishwasher, next to the sink meaning I'd have to do all kinds of electrics to make it safe for me to switch it all off) would get me down to basically just the big fridge-freezer and that's pulling 120W of that (averaged over the course of 24 hours). I'd like to point out that by "big" fridge-freezer I mean 55cm x 55cm x about 1.7m. It holds my entire month's worth of food and the little freezer only holds things I make with leftovers, bread and stuff I use / open it for often (it's far more efficient). I actually often turn off the little freezer for a week or so each month because it's empty and I have plenty of fresh food.
So this "phantom device" stuff is bullshit, and would just eat up the time, convenience, and utility of something that I literally go to work and then deliberately choose to pay for to make my life easier. These people want me to turn off my wifi router when I'm not at home (but that doesn't mean I'm not USING that connection), unplug things that I then have to constantly plug back in to use them (the ONLY device I turn off every time is my electric oven, and that's pure for my piece of mind for fire safety's sake), and not have home security, etc. In order to save about £50 a year in electricity.
And to do so, I'd save 30W, maybe, at best, on average throughout the whole day. 263KWh over the course of a year. With an average annual household usage of 3,940kWh. Less than 7% of my energy usage. Heating (air or water) accounts for the vast, vast, vast majority of the remaining 93% and that's AVERAGED over the year. I haven't turned my heating on in about 5 months. Not even for a second. I switch off my oven the second its done cooking. I don't pre-heat water in a boiler or a storage tank AT ALL. I turned it off because it's too expensive and wasteful. I have a direct-heating power shower, which is on for a few minutes each day, and I otherwise use cold water (all cold-fill appliances - both dishwasher and washing machine, cold water taps for bathroom sink, etc.).
Yes, if you're so desperately poor that you can't afford £1 a week in order to leave your wifi plugged in, maybe that's good advice.
Or if you have appliances pulling dozens of watts when they're not in operation (EU / UK standards dictate 1W on standby!).
Otherwise it's just absolute nonsense trash that people can just switch off stuff and save money. I could plunge my entire house into darkness and barely save the 5W that my living room uses to illuminate, and I never have lights on in rooms that I'm not in! Oh, and that INCLUDES the fact that those bulbs are Wifi-controlled!
Just the extra time, hassle, forgetfulness, and pissing about isn't worth that £1 a week. What the hell am I working and earning good money for if I have to live my life in darkness and can't afford to leave a USB charger plugged in, or have to unplug the microwave after every usage?
But Centrica / British Gas - formerly the nationalised gas supplier, but been privatised for years - made £1bn profit last year, given £10bn per year on average to their shareholders in dividends over the previous 10 years, are paying their boss £775,000 a year after having "waived his £1m bonus" and have striking staff because they pay an absolute pittance and are trying to move them all to new contracts that would let them pay even less.
Sorry, but fuck off. Time you were all re-nationalised so that what I pay for energy at least goes back into making energy, rather than someone's pension fund.
(P.S. the above stats all come from my smart meter and its display which... is plugged into the mains!)
(Score: 2) by isostatic on Sunday May 01 2022, @03:25PM
Your TV does not draw 56W in standby unless it’s very very broken. Mine uses between 0 and 1W (my meter doesn’t do parts of a watt and says zero). That’s a total of 24Wh a day max, or 8.76kWh a year. Reality is probably nearer half that, which would be under £1 a year.
(Score: 4, Insightful) by MostCynical on Thursday April 28 2022, @10:57AM (2 children)
Can anyone find the original 'research paper'?
This was prepared by an energy company.
They are suggesting high energy bills are your fault - not theirs. Who raised the prices? The onsumer or the energy company?
Besides, who has a VCR left on standby, these days?
"I guess once you start doubting, there's no end to it." -Batou, Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex
(Score: 3, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday April 28 2022, @12:16PM (1 child)
Do you ever leave your computer on standby? What about the monitor or printer? How about your TV or cable box? (hint: if you can turn it on with a remote, it wasn't off in the first place) There are many devices today that are always on, and some of them draw a lot more power than people realize. Multiply that by millions of homes and it adds up. Now throw in a gas shortage due to Putin's stupidity (Europe has many gas generators) and there is a need to reduce waste. Unlike companies in North America, European companies are expected to act in the public interest, especially during emergencies or wartime.
(Score: 3, Funny) by Freeman on Thursday April 28 2022, @07:04PM
That stinks of the same stuff that California is pushing with the people needing to conserve water. While they go ahead and let Agriculture use whatever amount they please.
Joshua 1:9 "Be strong and of a good courage; be not afraid, neither be thou dismayed: for the Lord thy God is with thee"
(Score: 4, Insightful) by isostatic on Thursday April 28 2022, @11:48AM (10 children)
Journalists don't understand kWh so they just regurgitate whatever nonsense
£147 a year is 40p per day, or 1.36kWh. That's a vampire load of 56 watts. That's how much a typical TV (say a 42" LG) uses if it's turned on.
(Score: 2, Disagree) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday April 28 2022, @12:19PM (9 children)
Now multiply that by ~20 million households. It adds up.
(Score: 2, Insightful) by Freeman on Thursday April 28 2022, @01:46PM (6 children)
Those 20 million households are paying for the electricity. Why should anyone care?
Joshua 1:9 "Be strong and of a good courage; be not afraid, neither be thou dismayed: for the Lord thy God is with thee"
(Score: 2) by epitaxial on Thursday April 28 2022, @04:44PM (3 children)
They're wasting money in an already bad economy?
(Score: 2) by Freeman on Thursday April 28 2022, @07:02PM (2 children)
The average person in the UK can afford to leave a TV running 24/7. Also, you think electric usage is bad now. Just think about how much electricity usage there will be with the ever increasing number of electric cars on the road.
Joshua 1:9 "Be strong and of a good courage; be not afraid, neither be thou dismayed: for the Lord thy God is with thee"
(Score: 3, Funny) by epitaxial on Saturday April 30 2022, @03:19AM (1 child)
That electricity would be doing something useful.
(Score: 2) by Freeman on Monday May 02 2022, @01:37PM
I like your optimism!
Joshua 1:9 "Be strong and of a good courage; be not afraid, neither be thou dismayed: for the Lord thy God is with thee"
(Score: 5, Funny) by RS3 on Thursday April 28 2022, @11:34PM (1 child)
It's for ecological / CO2 reasons. Electricity suppliers are under political and financial pressure to reduce carbon footprint, and are required to help consumers reduce power consumption.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by RS3 on Saturday April 30 2022, @12:30AM
Hey, I really appreciate the "funny" upmod, but I was being serious. I've done some work in the rooftop solar panel (PV) world. Power producers are required to produce a portion of their power from renewable (mostly solar). Since most major power generation companies don't actually have solar PV power generation, they have to buy SRECs [wikipedia.org], on the SREC market, from people who have PV systems.
There's a whole market system, much like stocks or futures, where people buy and sell SRECs. So if you put up PV panels, you'll get income from the SRECs. Some unscrupulous PV installers have oversold the SREC income potential. It varies like any stock or other similar investments.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday April 28 2022, @06:21PM
Yes, but the same scale applies to "people should just turn things off." It's just not practical to try and solve a problem by asking everybody in 20 million households to independently do the right thing.
But we don't need to ask 20 million households to do something. It is much more effective to attack this problem via energy efficiency standards since it only needs buy in from a much smaller group of people -- the people who are actually designing and building electronic devices. To a large extent this is already happening, and nowhere is more obvious than modern power supplies that are orders of magnitude less wasteful at low output current than ones from not all that long ago.
There are still some obvious low hanging fruit. One of the most egregious examples I'm aware of are mains powered smoke detectors that piss away huge amounts of power for no reason at all (after all, you can get battery units that run for 10 years of a single battery). I assume this is because there are no efficiency standards for mains powered smoke detectors so the manufacturers don't bother. I don't know the details but there are probably less than 5 manufacturers of smoke detectors for the western market. Let's fix things like this before we tell 20 million households to unplug their coffee machines every night.
(Score: 2) by isostatic on Sunday May 01 2022, @03:21PM
That’s not the point. The point is the authors of the report are lying their ass off, by an order of magnitude, to get headlines.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday April 28 2022, @03:04PM (4 children)
would be nice if those itty-bitty ac-2-dc usb converters had a lil switch on them.
having to remove and re-plug the whole thing into the wallsocket to get rid of the vampire is really annoying.
eh? also i see they now have ac wall-sockets that come with a integrated usb port? do these also attract vampires?
my home is less anemic since feeding the vampires solarblood (at least on most days and from 9am to 4pm). on some days the blood even spills out to the neighbourhood.
(Score: 4, Insightful) by mhajicek on Thursday April 28 2022, @04:59PM
They should have a microswitch to turn on when you plug in a USB cable.
The spacelike surfaces of time foliations can have a cusp at the surface of discontinuity. - P. Hajicek
(Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday April 28 2022, @05:41PM (1 child)
Just get a modern DC power supply that complies with the US efficiency regulations, they will have a circled "VI" printed along with the other certification logos. Such power supplies consume no more than 100mW when there is no load connected. Depending where you live, probably anything made in the past decade or so will probably fit the bill, as long as you avoid sketchy imports.
If you have older supplies compliant with the previous standard (circled "V") they can use as much as 1W no load power which in truth is still pretty tiny.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday April 28 2022, @11:36PM
-> "sketchy imports"
You implying there are other kinds?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday April 29 2022, @09:55PM
Before the new very low standby rules came in, I got sick of unplugging old monitors and other wall wart devices that don't need to be on standby.
I bought a bunch of plug in switches, like this, https://www.ebay.com/itm/353982874185 [ebay.com]
15 bucks for 5. They work great, just flip the switch, and the light reminds me if I forgot.
We don't use the TV all that often, so it's on a switched power strip, easy enough to flip that off too. Just have to remember to turn on 15 minutes before I want to watch cable...for the cable box to boot.
(Score: 2) by richtopia on Thursday April 28 2022, @03:28PM (1 child)
Vampire device articles pop up every year or two, so I suspect that most Soylents already audit their living space. Honestly, I think the biggest win for defeating these vampires has been the move away from TV cable boxes to smart TV or internet connected devices like Roku. Yea, they still run 24/7, but those cable boxes were really inefficent.
A related discussion that most people have heard is how much power your computer uses. I have a home server and purposefully selected an old laptop as the host. This is a good compromise between initial cost, power usage, and capability. I used to have an old gaming PC as my server which is better for expandablity, but the architecture is not power efficient. A Raspberry Pi probably would be the best for my almost always idle server, however I do prefer the x86 architecture for ease of administration and I was able to stuff 8GB of memory in the laptop pretty cheaply.
(Score: 2) by RS3 on Thursday April 28 2022, @11:43PM
I've been meaning to build a home server. I intentionally saved some P3 machines because they use so very little power. I'm not sure the numbers, but I know they run much cooler than a P2 or P4. And I have a couple Via C3 CPUs which can use ~1 W in sleep, and between 6 - 10.5 running.
(Score: 4, Interesting) by Mojibake Tengu on Thursday April 28 2022, @04:24PM (1 child)
I do not care about costs of electricity. I never did.
My computer kitchen power draw never goes under 1.8kW. That's my floor permanent consumption. It's so overt the local police already investigated me several times for suspect grower. The electric company regularly provides tips for that in residential area.
It's currently 2 rack servers, 2 desktops, 4 laptops, 4 headless bricks, 2 network printers, plenty of small jewelry like pads, phones and other tiny contraptions which are never powered off or stand-by. In bedroom, workshop machinery like drill mill and sewing machine, soldering station, several lab power supplies, desktop meters, generators, oscilloscopes, electronic musical instruments. Those are powered on only when used, but when they are, their total consumption is not negligible either.
I never owned a TV to spy on me or indoctrinating me.
Just wired network has gateway router, firewall and 6 switches, it spans to other places where my relatives live. Several critical devices and all the network have their own UPSes. Notebooks are used as terminals as they effectively are their own UPSes. I can keep myself online for 4-6-8 hours in total blackout if the ISP handles it well it too (they usually did). I do not use wireless for critical infrastructure, for it is too easy to suppress it by intentional interference either by criminals or by enforcers. Wireless only for toys.
Having UPSes is a critical factor. Usually the first thing the plain cloth police agents do when they investigate is switching off main power switch to suppress computers to prevent possible 'deletions of evidence' and possibly lure the suspect out. When this happens, my electronics issues silent Blue Alert for the network automatically. The machines know what to do in that situation. The security system goes to Red Alert on its own. At such moment, I usually storm out raving at the MiBs why they are tampering with my electricity supply, with all the multiple honking behind my back. Their faces understanding they just failed a mission are always priceless, when they admit their defeat by claiming a 'mistake'. It's the same scenario every time, by wording they all have learned the same script.
This base power draw effectively doubles when I start gaming and almost triples when I start cooking.
Maybe in energy crisis I should do less cooking I guess...
The edge of 太玄 cannot be defined, for it is beyond every aspect of design
(Score: 3, Touché) by epitaxial on Thursday April 28 2022, @04:47PM
https://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=Main%20Character%20Syndrome [urbandictionary.com]
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday April 28 2022, @05:59PM (1 child)
I rub garlic over all my electrical outlets every week. Problem solved.
(Score: 2) by Freeman on Thursday April 28 2022, @07:17PM
So long as you're not getting liquid in said outlets, sure. Otherwise, that outlet is going to bite.
Joshua 1:9 "Be strong and of a good courage; be not afraid, neither be thou dismayed: for the Lord thy God is with thee"
(Score: 2) by beernutz on Thursday April 28 2022, @07:36PM
This article seems to sum it up nicely:
https://shkspr.mobi/blog/2021/10/no-you-cant-save-30-per-year-by-switching-off-your-standby-devices/ [shkspr.mobi]