Advanced options
What The Standby Cost Calculator Works Out
- Per year: the household's constant standby wattage x 24 hours x 365 days, divided by 1,000 for kilowatt-hours and multiplied by the unit rate (defaults to the current Ofgem price cap unit rate). A typical house idles at 20W to 40W, which is GBP 50 to GBP 100 a year at current rates.
- Per day: the annual figure divided by 365. Regulation capped standby for most new devices at a watt or under, so modern TVs, phone chargers and kettles with clocks all cost pennies; the genuine vampires are older set-top boxes and PVRs, consoles in always-ready modes, AV amplifiers, powered subwoofers and desktop PCs "asleep" ambitiously.
- Worth switching off?: the quick verdict. Things doing a job while off (router, fridge, anything recording or acting as a smart-home hub) stay on; convenience standbys go on a switched lead or smart plug; true idlers such as the guest-room TV justify the wall switch permanently.
- Custom standby draw (advanced): enter the whole-house figure from a plug-in energy monitor or your smart meter's overnight baseload instead of a preset. The warm-to-the-touch test is the folk diagnostic.
- Share you could switch off (advanced): the percentage of the standby draw that is on devices you can safely cut. Half is typical once the router, fridge and recorders are excluded.
- Smart plugs, cost and own draw (advanced): how many smart plugs or switched extensions you need, what each costs (GBP 8 to GBP 15) and the roughly 1W each smart plug draws itself, the observer effect of the energy-saving world. The saving card nets that draw off.
- Smart plug payback (advanced): the plugs' total cost divided by the net annual saving, in months. Three plugs on a 30W house typically pay back within a year.
- Holiday walk-round saving (advanced): what switching everything but the fridge off saves over the weeks you are away each year, the standby jackpot and the insurance-friendly tradition.
- Proportion: standby's GBP 50-odd sits well below the heating, hot water and tumble-drying tiers of the bill, so it is the low-effort win rather than the crusade. Five minutes of smart plugs captures it; a nightly unplugging ritual does not add much.