More and more devices in our home are designed to be ‘always on’ making them ever so convenient to use with no waiting. Over the last few years ‘always on’ has become part of our lives with voice assistants, wireless speakers and other smart home devices ready to leap into instant action. However ‘always on’ comes at a cost to your energy bill and to CO2 emissions.
In Ourhomeelectric we’ve started to think more about what devices are always on and if the convenience really outweighs the costs – to us and to the planet. Some things need to be always on – the wifi and network infrastructure supports browsing, home security and smart home automations 24/7 – this isn’t about going back to the 90s!
We have a Sonos multi-room speaker system – it’s great and works well but have to admit there are a one or two speakers that don’t get much use – maybe a couple of hours a week. Well done to Sonos for publishing the standby power consumption of their speakers – our two speakers that we don’t use much are using 8W in total – that’s almost £24 a year on the price cap tariff, slightly less at around £19 on our Octopus Go tariff. CO2 wise it’s over 20kg or equivalent to driving 100 miles in a 50mpg car. It is zero hassle to turn the speakers on when we want to use them and off again later. For us here always on isn’t worth it.
In the living room there’s a bit more tech that’s always on.
In total everything takes around 40W when it’s not active. The Sonos speakers get a lot of use at what could be any time of the day or night and the BT disc provides their network connection as well as decent Wifi in that part of the house. For us those always on devices deliver value. That’s not the case with the TV/Sky/Beam combination – takes around 25W when inactive and we rarely use it overnight or in the morning. In the olden days the sky box might have been downloading in the background but with 150Mb/s fibre we can access anything on demand. It does take a couple of minutes for the Sky Q to boot up though.
Everything is a choice – we’ve decided to put the Sky/TV/Beam on a smart plug and use a timer to turn everything off at midnight and turn it back on at midday. We’ve lost none of the convenience of instant on when we use it most but have saved 12 hours of 25W – 300 Wh a day – costing around £29 a year on Octopus Go (£37 on price cap tariff). The smart plug cost a tenner and we’ve had to add an old Echo Dot (1-2W) back into the room to make up for Alexa not being there when the Beam is switched off. The smart plug takes around 1W.
In future we will be thinking a lot harder before adding new always on devices – attitudes have to change. Manufacturers could do more too – drive down standby power to 1 W or less – you know it makes sense.