Uwe Hermann | A slightly paranoid Debian developer

Inspired by this post from Lars Wirzenius, I recently bought an electricity meter (or energy meter) and measured the energy consumption of everything I could find in my flat.

I did not yet perform any long-term tests, i.e. measuring the average consumption over multiple days or so, only some quick ad-hoc checks. I just recorded the number of watts the respective device used when powered on.

Here are the results:

Kitchen stuff:

• Microwave. Off: 0 W. On: 1150 W.
  Depends on the configured "mode" of the microwave, I used the highest/hottest mode here.
• Coffee machine. Off: 0 W. On: 884 W.
• Mini-oven. Off: 0 W. On: 800 W.
  Depends on the configured "mode" of the mini-oven, I used the highest/hottest mode here.
• Kettle. Off: 0 W. On: 2035 W.
  Quite a shock. I bet there are more energy-efficient ones out there, but still...
• Toaster. Off: 0 W. On: 168 W.
• Fridge. Off: 0 W. On: 110 W.
  This needs testing over a longer period of time. Fridges are not powered all the time.

Computer stuff:

• Printer (Epson Stylus DX4200). Off: 0 W. Idle: 2.6 W. Printing: 10 W.
• Laptop (Toshiba Satellite A80-117). Off: 0 W. On: 40 W. Heavy CPU load: 50 W. In powersave mode: 32 W.
• PC (ASUS P4B266, 2 GHz). Off: 2.7 W. On: 60 W. Heavy CPU load: 92 W.
• Computer monitor (CRT). Off: 1.7 W. On: 77 W. Pretty dark screen contents: 60 W. Text console: 50 W.
• NSLU2. Off: 0 W. On: 3.5 W. Heavy CPU load: 3.9 W.
  This is one of the greatest pieces of hardware I ever bought, and these numbers are one reason for that!
• External USB hard drive. Off: 0 W. On: 9.6 W. Heavy I/O load: 10.8 W.
• DSL splitter + router. Off: 0 W. On: 1.2 W.
• Radio. Off: 0.6 W. On: 2.1 W.
• Shredder. Off: 0 W. On: 40-60 W.
• External loudspeakers ("bass booster"). Off: 1.5 W. On: 3.5 W.
• Portable mini CD player. Off: 0.4 W. On: 1.6 W.

By removing all devices which draw more than 0 watts in stand-by mode, I was able to reduce the overall (useless) energy consumption (and costs!) quite a bit.

I also replaced a bunch of 40 W and 60 W lightbulbs with energy saving lightbulbs which are equally bright, but only consume 8 W or 12 W respectively. On the long run you can save quite some amount of energy (and money) with them. They do cost a little bit more than normal lightbulbs, but save lots of electricity costs and they also last a lot longer (8000-15000 hours vs. 1000 hours according to Wikipedia).