EEVblog 1505 - 120W Home Phantom Power? Audit Time!

My home takes 120W phantom standby power. Let's do a complete audit and see what is consuming the most power, and how it can be reduced.

00:00 - Standby power measurement audit
07:52- The fuse box
11:46 - Spreadsheet analysis and differential power measurement

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#ElectronicsCreators #phantompower #solar

[EEVblog]

NOTE: I completely forgot three mains powered smoke alarms. We had to fit these when the home extension was added to meet new building codes. I thought they were still battery powered (but they do have battery backup)

[johnnyrosenberg]

To me, phantom power means something completely different: 48 VDC for condenser microphones.

[organiccold]

I worked as service engineer for Miele, their appliances are one if not the best in the market, very well built and very energetic efficient, even the detergent and water consumption re very low, and they last for ever, in fact you can still get parts for your 40 year old Miele washing machine! Good luck in other manufacturers. Very cool video Dave.
At my work place we spent £5000 retrofitting LEDs in place of the CFLs, we went form 9500 watts to 3500watts. That is a lot!

[mtpaley]

It would be good if you teardown a efficient sony power supply with some generic one that is taking far too much power. I would like to see what the internal differences are.

[flymypg]

I did a similar energy audit and added some home automation to try to manage it better, only to find some of the RF controlled power relays had worse power use than the loads they were managing! My next plan is to centralize all this into the mains breaker panel, then pull some new circuits as needed. But that's for the next remodel...

[trickyrat]

I did a detailed energy audit recently. Following some significant changes, I managed to shave £2, 600.00 off my energy bills per year.

Mind you, my parents aren't happy to see me back home again.. :)

[eugenioarpayoglou]

One of the largest savings in electricity I've made was installing a solar (not PV) water heater. I still use the electric water heater but it draws hot water from the solar heater on the roof so 9 months out of the year the electric heater doesn't even turn on, and in winter it takes in warm water instead of cold. I'm in the southern hemisphere also (Uruguay) and we get direct sunlight all year round.

[lululombard]

Please do a DC mod of your alarm system, I'm actually curious to see how much energy you can save!

[edwardsdean]

I wouldn't recommend turning off the NBN routers, if they detect your connection keeps dropping out they will put a speed profile on your service, which slows the speed down, best to leave it on for best performance

[dkad]

Dave, great video, well done.

I was checking my home recently as well for parasitic loads and what surprised me was my Klipsch 2.1 multimedia speakers for my PC. This setup uses a powered sub and when idle it draws 19 watts!

I have since put that plug on a seperate switch to power off when not in use.

[novusordo]

I did something similar and found some hardwired loads to the house. One was inside a wall compartment, powering a UPS for the wired phone line. I only found this because the UPS started to beep due to battery failure. The other loads were in the attic, powering wall-warts to the AC air handler.

[mrnixie]

Note for UK users (your mileage may vary), EVERY SINGLE WATT of phantom power is costing you almost GBP £3 per year! It all adds up... Dave's 120W (not untypical) is therefore costing around £350 per year. This year, next year, and the year after. Neon indicators in extension sockets - half a watt each. So they've all come out! Name brand switched mode "wall wart" power supplies do perform noticeably better than no-name ones, AND probably wont kill you either. Which is nice. All my PC accessories (screens, printers, speakers) are now on a automatic slave powered socket which is only live when the main PC is on. Worst culprit was an old 'fridge in the garage which serves just to keep a few "tinnies" cold (for "emergencies"! :) ). That averaged over 20W! So it's now unplugged. Warm beer never tasted better.

[thomasostman]

The high reactive effect means that you pump a lot of current into the cables, which also become losses in the form of watts in the cables between your power meter and the consumers

[bradnewman]

G'day Dave. Some air conditioner manufacturers design their compressors to have a small amount of current pass through the motor winding to keep oil warm to prevent refrigerant migration to compressor sump. This is to increase compressor life.

[nophead]

Interesting your Miele dishwasher was only 0.15W. I recently reverse engineered our Bosch dishwasher for a repair that took three months and I measured the standby at 0.16W, so probably similar electronics. It has lots of power saving techniques, e.g. a chip to disconnect the X2 cap discharge resistor while the mains is on and only connect it when the mains is disconnected. It has circuits to measure the heater relay outputs which take about 1mA. It has a special chip to disconnect those high voltage monitoring circuits when the power is off. An opto isolated serial bus between the user interface MCU and the main control MCU that gets powered down in standby by another opto and then needs a fourth opto for the soft power on.

[ewicky]

Nice work, Dave! Some things you actually want running 24/7, and other things are just "not worth it" to try to optimize. 120W is pretty good, especially for a large home with a techie resident.

[TheRadeonVideo]

One more thing about power measurements: many small power supplies can be not only capacitive load, but also very non-linear and noisy. Power meters have some error related to this and it may vary alot from one instrument to another.
I`ve seen one meter mistaking Sonoff wifi relay(<1W consumption) for 1.5kW _generation_.

Also, ~100w for a house seems very good for me. I have around 200w standby in apartment.


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[WizardTim]

My house has a couple of mysterious loads that you can't turn off, for example the doorbell consumes a good a couple of watts, but you'd never know though as it was hardwired in when the house was build, don't even know what it looks like, only reason I know is because I can see on the thermal camera there's a warm spot on the ceiling where the doorbell is the loudest. Also surprised to find I have a much higher idle power consumption mostly because of a server that runs 24/7 but also all the ovenized test equipment that's always in soft standby along with plenty of environmental sensor data loggers.

Also, I think if you tell your kids you're gonna start turning the internet off at night they'll hand crank a generator to repay you the 300 Wh, but you'll probably have to sleep with an eye open.

[MrDoneboy]

Wow...It truly is Phantom Power! I need to audit my home, as well...Thanks, Dave!

[kevinmartin]

Perhaps the difference between the power measured at the devices and at the panel is the resistive losses due to the reactive current. Take the total VA, divide by 240 to get the current, and estimate the resistance of a typical wire run from the panel to the outlet (count both legs), then see if this reasonably accounts for the difference.