How to Identify and Measure Phantom Loads in Your Home

Who likes to pay more for their electricity bill when they don’t have to? How to identify and measure phantom loads to save money.

What is a phantom load?

“Phantom load” is a term commonly used to refer to the standby power consumed by appliances and devices when they are not actively being used.

If you’re listening to music through your home stereo and the consumption is 80 watts, that’s the active load. If the stereo is off and still using 5 watts of power, that’s the phantom load.

However, not all phantom loads are inherently bad, even if you initially assume that any power consumed when you are not actively using a device or application is wasted power. There are pros and cons to a device’s phantom load, with almost all of the pros centered around our comfort levels – such as: B. Ensuring that devices turn on quickly or retain their settings.

But eliminating phantom loads in your home when those phantom loads aren’t doing you any good or making your life more comfortable is a noble effort that’s good for the environment and saves you money.

How much money will you save? While this depends heavily on the makeup of your household and the number of appliances you have, the average household could easily save hundreds of dollars a year in electricity costs per year by aggressively eliminating phantom loads.

But no worry; We won’t leave you with a vague estimate. In a moment, we’ll show you how to measure the loads yourself and calculate how much they cost you.

How to identify phantom loads

So how do you tell which devices have a phantom load and which don’t? While the only way to know for sure is to actually measure the device’s power consumption, there are some telltale signs.

Here are some basic questions to ask about a specific device. If the answer to any question is yes, then the device has a phantom power load.

• Does the device or the device’s “wall wart” charging brick feel warm when the device is off?
• Does it have a remote control or can it be turned on remotely via the local network or other means?
• Does it have lights, displays, or other indicators that stay on when the device is off?
• Is the device programmable and/or saves the settings between uses without the help of a battery?
• Does the device have a timer function to automate certain processes (making coffee, turning on lights, etc.)?

In short, if a device turns on immediately (especially via remote) or otherwise appears operational as if it were partially on and waiting, that’s a good indicator that it was in fact partially on.

How to measure phantom loads

Let’s look at how to measure a phantom load at the individual device level and then, for the curious out there, how to check your entire home’s phantom load.

How to measure the phantom load of individual devices

While placing your hand on a power brick and feeling the heat will tell you that the device is using some power, it won’t tell you how much. To find out how much, you need a meter.

Our favorite device, which we have recommended for years, is the P4460 Kill a Watt power monitor from P3 International. Not only can you connect a device to it and see exactly how many watts the device is pulling down, but you can program the Kill a Watt with your local electricity price per kWh and get an estimate for the device of how much a given device is costing you per day , week, month and year.

The Kill a Watt is accurate to 0.2% and can measure down to 0.1W. Although it’s worth noting that below 1W, especially below 0.5W, basic commercial wattmeters, including Kill a Watt, are less accurate.

At extremely low standby power levels, you need more sophisticated laboratory equipment to measure power with extreme accuracy. For our purposes, however, the Kill a Watt is serviceable and great value for money. Finding out if a device has a 20W phantom load is more important than figuring out if the phantom load is really 0.6W or 0.4W.

We have a detailed guide on using the Kill A Watt meter to measure your home’s energy use if you’d like to read more about it, but using it to measure a single appliance’s standby power is quite simple. Just plug it in and read the output on the display.

You might be shocked by the results, by the way. While many devices such as A cell phone charger, for example, has a phantom load so small that the Kill a Watt can’t measure it, other things will draw more power than you would expect.

For example, I tested several Samsung Smart TVs near my home and the idle phantom load ranged from 14 to 18W depending on the size of the TV. With an electricity cost of 12 cents per kWh, it costs about $17 per TV that does Leaving TV plugged in and idle for a year.

How to measure your home’s net phantom load

It is one thing to measure the individual load on the devices in order to determine in each individual case whether it is worth leaving the devices connected all the time. But what if you’re curious about your home’s entire phantom load?

That’s kind of a new thing to be curious about. Your home has a “standby” mode when you’re not enjoying it and enjoying all the amenities, so what is that? This will give you a rough idea of ​​how much energy your home uses in different states.

To do this, you need access to the power meter for your home so that you can read the data displayed on it. You will also need a stopwatch and a calculator. We outline the method and required equation in the section of this article titled Using Your Electric Meter To Measure Electricity Usage, so read that section before proceeding as we won’t repeat the entire process here. Instead, we’ll focus on tips to help you get a real sense of what your home’s net phantom load is.

First, let’s create a baseline to have a reference point and a basis for judging changes. Do not change anything in your home, such as B. Disconnecting devices. Go outside to the meter and measure the energy consumption using the technique described in the article above. For example, let’s say you calculate your hourly power consumption as 1,400W – which is pretty close to the national average.

After establishing the baseline, go inside your home and turn off or unplug any appliances or devices that are required for your home to function and/or cannot be unplugged.

For example, you would never turn off your oven to conserve standby power, or unplug your refrigerator. Efficient or not, these things need to stay on for your safety and well-being. However, by turning them off briefly, we can remove the standby power they might be using from our home review and focus on everything else that stays connected, like TVs, computers, smart speakers, etc.

If those devices are unplugged and the rest of the devices in the house are plugged in but turned off, go back outside and check your meter again. For example, let’s say the display and your calculations show that your house uses 900W of electricity. That’s the collective idle power of everything (except the fridge and those you just unplugged) in your house. Every TV, every power strip, every phone charger, even the smallest phantom load, if any, from every circuit board on every LED lamp.

If you’re even more curious, you can go back and unplug more things. Unplug the TV in the guest room. Unplug your old game console that you barely play. Unplug anything you don’t want instant easy access to – if you’re willing to put in a little hassle every now and then to plug it in to save money, unplug it now.

Take a final reading of the power meter. Let’s assume that the reading is now 600 W. The difference between the reading when idle but plugged in, 900 W, and the reading when idle but not plugged in, 600 W, is 300 W.

At 12 cents per kWh, a 300W standby load will cost you $315.36 for a full year. That’s not exactly an insignificant amount of money, and one that might make you seriously consider unplugging everything when you’re not using it.