There’s a certain kind of energy advice that just won’t die. You’ve probably heard it:
Switch off appliances at the wall. Phantom loads are stealing your electricity!
That made sense twenty years ago. Back when power bricks got properly hot. Back when standby meant drawing tens of watts. These days? Not so much.
Take my 2023 LG C3 OLED. Beautiful TV. Pulls 115W when its on. But in standby? 0.5 watts. Over 8 hours overnight, that’s 4 watt-hours. At 30 cents per kilowatt-hour, we’re talking 0.1 cents. One-tenth of a cent. Even over a full year, that’s $0.36. Less than a Chupa Chups.
Routers and NBN modems? Let’s be generous. Together they might draw 20 Watts when idle. That’s 160 watt-hours overnight. About 5 cents per night. A bargain for always-on internet, smart home updates, and iCloud backups while you sleep.
And yet, earnest advice-givers will still insist you flick every switch. Every night. And again every morning.
Save Your Attention For What’s Important
Here’s the problem: all that mental energy spent switching off things that barely matter leaves less bandwidth for decisions that do.
Last night, I got fed up trying to set a delayed start on my new Bosch dishwasher. I had to work out how many hours until off-peak kicks in at 1 am. So I grabbed my phone, opened the Home Connect app, and two minutes later it was configured for a set start time instead of a fixed delay. Now I just press one button after dinner, and it waits quietly until off-peak. I’m not sure I’d have had the idea if I was busy switching every appliance in the kitchen off at the socket.
It’s the 80-20 rule on steroids. Most homes burn 80% of their energy on way less than 20% of their appliances: hot water, anything that heats, cools or dries, EVs. That’s worth your attention. But your router? Please.
I get it, flicking a switch feels proactive. But the real wins now come from systems thinking, not socket flipping.
Electronics Are Now Designed To Run Continuously
And then there are the unintended consequences. Cycling power 730 times a year doesn’t do your gear any favours. Modern electronics are designed to run continuously. Power-cycling stresses components, especially capacitors1
Look, I’m a progressive. Always have been. But one of the traps we fall into is sweating over virtuous small stuff while missing the big picture. And sure, switching something off costs nothing. A new heat pump or solar system costs thousands.
But your time, attention, and patience are finite resources too.
Spend them wisely.
Footnotes
- Frequent power cycling can stress components like capacitors and solder joints, potentially shortening the lifespan of electronics. It’s a well-known issue in power supply design, flagged by both IEEE and manufacturers like Texas Instruments. ↩
About Finn Peacock
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We have a house alarm system that uses an old brick that is always warm to the touch. AFAIK all it does is trickle charge a gel cell 12V backup battery.
Apparently they still sell the systems with the brick. Yes I sweat this one so much I wanted to swap to a modern transformer.
I used to switch the modem off at night (using a timer) but then I miss my battery data so leave it on now. I was surprised it only uses 5W.
This advice applies to everything in life too 🙂
Thanks for today’s article on switching appliances off at the wall. Accords with my feelings and practices.
But another reason many of my family members advance is that switching off at the wall provides more protection against power surges. Seems to me you’d need to unplug as well to get any real benefit.
Any thoughts?
I have always wondered about this. When I view my app for energy use on my hybrid system it illustrates that my system at night use between 200-250 watts but I have virtually nothing on except my computer on sleep and the modem and a energy efficient fridge. I know that the inverter uses a small amount being connected to the grid but that is ridiculous. Mystified
No need to be mystified. It’s your fridge drawing most of that 200 to 250 watts. It may be energy efficient but it still needs to draw power to do it’s only job – to refrigerate.
Good point but it’s a constant red line read out.
Most modern fridges have variable speed compressors, just like modern efficient Aircons, not on/off/on/off etc
Cameras. home automation devices etc all use power. Maybe not a lot but it all adds up: 5w there, 10w here etc etc
(We have two fridges, about ten cameras, and a few other devices such as smart speakers. Our typical night time power use is around 250w, but make up for it with good insulation- a white color bond roof and very efficient split system A/Cs which don’t get very much use.)
You could carry out a simple test to see what the fridge is drawing from the wall.
Turn it off at the wall (unplug as well maybe) and monitor the draw for an hour (the fridge contents will stay cold for hours if the seals are doing their job).
You could do the same with your PC, actually shut it down and unplug it from the wall.
The only cost to you for doing this experiment is your sleep. The benefit being peace of mind.
Dr David MacKay said it a decade ago in his free to download book “Sustainable Energy Withput The Hot Air’:
“every little helps… but only a little.”
Slowing down on the highway a little will make so much more differance than fussing with home electronics.
In our part of Canada we’re heating the house for the better part of eight months a year, and it’s getting down to around 10 C at night in the middle of summer.
RIP David MacKay – the best book on renewables ever written.
I look at this in a fair bit of detail (probably too much detail) for my house.
For the last month for example in the last month, we averaged 27.87kWh/Day.
This included:
– Stuff Plugged into PowerPoints – 7.95kWh/Day.
– Home Networking and Automation is 1.4kWh/Day of this load.
– Washing, Drying and Dishwasher is 1.57kWh/Day of this load.
– Hot Water (2 units) – 6.34kWh/Day.
– Heating (5 x RCAC) – 5.10kWh/Day.
– Cooking 1kWh/Day,
– Lighting 1.20kWh/Day.
With stuff plugged into powerpoints being 28.5% of my daily energy, these loads aren’t insignificant.
I do disconnect my home-entertainment system overnight as I have smart powerpoint, the home automation system turns it off overnight. Perhaps I need reconsider this choice.
I’m surprised at you, Finn. Why not run your dishwasher during the day, when the sun is shining and your solar panels are producing ‘free’ energy? That’s what we do in my household. Or is it that you need all those free electrons to charge your EVs? 🙂
I have a family of five. The dishwasher is full after dinner.
You can still leave the dirty dishes in the dishwasher overnight (with or without a rinse cycle), and do them in the morning / afternoon when the sun’s up. Mind you, with a family of five you’d need to have plenty of clean dishes!
no thanks, we need an empty dishwasher for the breakfast dishes…
Finn famously went big on solar and battery systems and they are presumably there to be used!
Even at a generous load of 2 kWh for a dish cycle… the 20 kWh array will cover that in about 6 minutes of peak sun.
So set it to run the next day midday. It will be finished ready for your next evening meal.
then we’d have a dishwasher full of dirty dishes in the morning. no thanks
I’m with you Finn. People need to live their lives. Overcomplicated solutions requiring too much mental effort or compromise won’t work for most people. I’ve seen some zealots propose, without apparent irony, that a great solution is to have 2 EV’s and use them on alternate days so one can be charging while you are using the other one.
I’ve thought about charging one while driving the other too. But like using solar PV power to run an electric tumble- dryer, it seems wrong somehow.
Isn’t a big part of the solar to EV solution to have an AC charger plug at work? And rows of them at shopping centres, hospitals, etc?
Hi Finn
Got A 2kwh Buletti Power Station. The Power station power input is controlled by a timer. On the Power station output I have an industrial earth leakage power point, and the TV, Computer, Router, and a bit of other stuff connected.
The timer is set to switch on the power station after sunrise and switch off the power station a bit after sunset, that way the solar runs it all very nicely most of the time. Saves switching everything off since the power station works like an Uninterrupted Power Supply.
When all is on standby the load is 90w, that works out as 2.16kwh per 24 hours.
Interesting. I do this for most things basically automatically. Maybe I won’t crawl around under my computer desk to switch it off at the wall, but the power board it plugs into? Off when I’m done. The jug? Off when it’s finished. The fan? Off at the end of the night – at least the parts of the year it gets use. So on and so forth. Since it’s automatic it doesn’t take mental energy.
It’s not just a matter of saving power, however few watts that may be, it’s also about limiting the risk of power surges – there’s less risk of something going wrong if it’s off. Strictly speaking pulled out would be safer but …
And yes I’ve had one router half fried because of a power surge. Technically it still worked, but the performance was badly degraded!!!
Let’s just get one thing right! First, you call it “PHASE SHIFT”? How does that equate to leaving electrical equipment on or on standby?
Why not call it just “SWITCHED ON?” Phase shift just doesn’t even get close, so why use it?
I’m fed up with all the electrical jargon that is being used, only to confuse everyone. Take the owner’s manual for your solar panels, or even worse, the battery. You will need Lawyers and even Uni Lecturers to explain it all!
Some of the wording is just outright stupid!
I tried to charge my Sungrow battery at night, on the cheap tariff, the term Sungrow uses is “Force Charge”! It makes it sound like I’m a cruel owner doing awful things to the battery. Then, if the instructions confuse you, you go onto YouTube and you find the Sungrow video on how to do it all, but guess what? It’s all out of date!!! The new APP is different and unless you work out that the top menu slides to the left and reveals more, then you get nowhere!
🙂 Eric, I think Phase Shift is the blog page title. The topic is ‘On Standby’
As to the frustrating ‘how tos’,… try chilling a while – it helps me 🙂
What term would you choose to describe forcing your battery to be charged from the grid?
Chill pill required. It’s more fun if there’s jargon
I’m really enjoying this series of Phase Shift articles… keep it up!
It’s amazing to see how solar tech has changed over the last 20 or so years and how my routine has adapted. I remember declaring war on the many tiny loads which overnight add up to a small number of watt-hours… my 10kW system will cover that in a flash.
Great article. As usual you point out the obvious. Everyone should concentrate on big energy consumption items. I hear know it all people all the time apparently saving mega $ by turning off standby items, they don’t know the truth, what a wasted exercise for them, i agree with you. Would be more time wasted thinking about it. Routers and portable devices just should be running, bugger all power used. Keep up the great work.
In terms of the cost of living and saving money, most people don’t give a thought as to the cost of fuel/energy and how often we just get in the car and go out when we want to.
Yet at the same time, many get all hung up about saving the tiniest amounts of electricity by turning everything off at the wall. The moment you start your car and back it out of the driveway you’ve likely used more energy than by having everything unplugged for a whole month!
IOW if people started being as miserly and mindful around vehicle energy use as they were around standby power energy use, then there’d be some serious gains to be had, and money to be saved.
I have also bought remote on/off devices for some sockets such as heaters which do not have their own timer functionality. For this use case they pay themselves back quickly. But if you buy them to save money on standby power, I bet in almost all cases you’ll never recover the cost of the unit over it’s entire lifetime.
Great Points Reuben,
I’ve always been amazed that people buy cars with little regard for mileage. It’s often down to what the manufacturers offer, overweight 4WD utes are fashionable grocery getters and horrible on fuel.
And when you see the thousands of tonnes of vehicles commuting in and out of cities every day, the waste is colossal.
Good article, and worth some (slightly) serious thinking.
So here I was switching everything off every evening and switching back on in the morning, or with Radio or TV, when I want to use them.
Except! Fridg, Freezer, all the Solar stuff, Oven, although to be fair I put a small towel over the Quartz display when I go to bed, and all the Clipsal Saturn Light Switches, after all when I want to go to the dunny in the wee small hours (pun intended) their little lights are great.
And when I go away, I leave the Comms stuff going so I can check Energy stuff.
So I might start to “live dangerously” and go over to the light side and leave things I normally shutdown, on!
I’ll see what impact it has on my monthly bills.
Thanks for the article and most of the comments. The issues around cost and equipment maintenance are all well made. This might seem like changing the subject but no one seems to have raised the issue of EMR sensitivity? As we increase our exposure more of us will want to factor such considerations into our life routines. Not all that easy.
We have 3 fridges of which two are bar fridges, as well as, a freezer, TV, IT gear, some laptops, lots of electronics including pool controller, irrigation controller, alarm, CCTV and other stuff. Power consumption during the night is 500W. 8 hours is 4kWh and 90 day billing is 360kWh at a 23c tariff so the total is $82. Most of Thais consumption is from the fridges so the standby stuff is probably about $30. Big deal.