Bulbs blowing,huge bill...

heate

dak wrote: »

heate wrote: »

300w! That's a lot for standby. Would make me question my leaving everything either in standby and chargers etc plugged in!
Though my electricity bill is pretty insignificant in the grand scheme of Swiss living costs! 300w sounds ridiculous I've a UPC my UPC Hd on standby constantly what a waste it seems

Apologies Heate. I got that one totally wrong. Someone must have switched a light on in the house when I was checking the change in consumption . Its more like 25w after testing it a few times. Still leaving it in standby 24/7 is costing €40 euro a year .

I may just switch mine off its part of my broadband package I don't actually watch Swiss tv anyway. €40 for old rope so!

Bruthal

dak wrote: »

heate wrote: »

300w! That's a lot for standby. Would make me question my leaving everything either in standby and chargers etc plugged in!
Though my electricity bill is pretty insignificant in the grand scheme of Swiss living costs! 300w sounds ridiculous I've a UPC my UPC Hd on standby constantly what a waste it seems

Apologies Heate. I got that one totally wrong. Someone must have switched a light on in the house when I was checking the change in consumption . Its more like 25w after testing it a few times. Still leaving it in standby 24/7 is costing €40 euro a year .

Energy monitors are not an accurate way to measure the consumption of low wattage items. They sometimes dont respond to something much smaller than 40 or 50 watts.

So if for example a 50 watt light is switced on, and the monitor does not register it, then you switch on the UPC box, its 25 watts plus the 50 the monitor didnt respond to, suddenly comes up as 75 watts.

This can be misleading.

They also seem to stick at times for a lot longer than the 5 seconds etc they usually take readings at, further confusing what is truely being read when a small item is switched on. This probably depends on how good a signal its getting from the sensor transmitter.

Any items like sky boxes, set top boxes etc are all low wattage. An electric shower for example, uses about 300 times the wattage that a UPC box uses. So for a 10 minute shower, you can use the UPC box for about 50 hours continuous.

So items like UPC boxes etc probably need to be put into perspective when talking about €300 euro bills. The 28 watt UPC box on 24 hours a day for an entire billing period would cost about €7.

It also says 28 watts max according to an earlier post. Its likely the nominal is below this.

manatoo

cast_iron wrote: »

There's a hard drive amongst other things in it I suppose.

The low power standby is a setting you can activate. I think the start up time of the box is a bit longer on the lower setting, and that's about it.
You can also set it to automatically switch to standby if inactive, with a night time only option on that, so that it won't knock off if you are watching golf or something over a few hours.

Has anyone else here noticed that switching on the low power standby option causes the hard drive to be constantly active when the device is on standby? That's what I found with mine so I switched it back to normal standby in which case it's silent when on standby. Doesn't make sense but that's what I found and no it wasn't recording something when I checked

cast_iron

No. I noticed the opposite. The hard drive runs when the box is active - this allows you to pause live tv.
In standby, it was very quiet. Maybe it updates itself or does self check or something every now and again. I think I have heard it once or twice while on standby before, bit I'm not sure on that.

Solair

A set top box does not use 300W !! If it is, there's something seriously wrong with it! They typically use considerably less than 100W when they're running.

Tumble dryers will use typically about 2500-2800W. You can get more efficient models that use heat-pumps.

Washing machines typically use about 1600-2000W, but only while heating, which is only a relatively short period of the wash. They'd only use about 500W max while tumbling / rinsing etc.

The usual huge drains are water-heaters and electric showers.

No plug-in appliance goes beyond 3000W as the fuse in the plug will not allow more than roughly that kind of current to flow.

Lighting, particularly recessed spots can be enormously expensive to run. If you've an array of halogen spots in the ceiling they can easily use several hundred watts.

Alun

Solair wrote: »

A set top box does not use 300W !! If it is, there's something seriously wrong with it! They typically use considerably less than 100W when they're running.

I tested my standard (i.e. non-HD) UPC box and it used 20W while in standard "standby" mode and about 25W when running, hardly any difference. I never used the low-power standby option.

dingding

OP, you can get plug in energy monitors that you plug into a wall socket and then plug the appliance into them. These would be more accurate for measuring the usage of individual devices.

My i5 PC uses about 55 watts, but can spike at 85 when it is busy processing and all the cores are running. i.e. When you go to open office.