Your Home Base Load / Background Power Draw

[jack]

On 14/07/2019 at 17:26, joth said:

The home-theater amp is the most  disappointing, given it's a fairly new model, Sony STR-DN1080, and 50W is crazy for just sitting there doing nothing. The obvious thing would be to use a slave switch to power it right down when the TV is off, but it'd defeat one of the main reasons I went for that model (built in Chromecast for multiroom music streaming).

 

Isn't it an EU requirement that all electronic equipment have a <1W standby mode? 

 

Also, does any of this help?

[joth]

On 16/07/2019 at 11:51, jack said:

Isn't it an EU requirement that all electronic equipment have a <1W standby mode? 

 

So there is: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/One_Watt_Initiative

 

On 16/07/2019 at 11:51, jack said:

Also, does any of this help?

Thanks!  Hmm again looks like I'd need to disable the useful features I bought it for, I might just have to suck that up though, the current £60 a year it is costing is silly.

"Remote power on" completely defeating the low-power standby mode (to the tune of 50W) really doesn't seem in the spirit of EC Regulation 1275/2008 though.

 

 

[SteamyTea]

On 14/07/2019 at 12:22, SteamyTea said:

Seems to be about 0.55W (4.9V and 0.2A).

If someone reminds me, I shall look at the Wh reading next week to get a better idea of what is happening.

12:15 PM 14/07/2019

Almost a week later, but it is sunny and I want to go out.

So after a week, my 7 sensor RPi has used 90.6 Wh, it has run for 165 hours, so that is 0.56W.

With my E7 tariff that works out at about 0.3p/day. Or about £1/year.

[ProDave]

I am just back from 2 weeks away. So 2 weeks with no cooking, no washing no tumble dryer etc.  Just the usual stuff on standby, fridge etc.

In that 2 weeks it used 39KWh per week or 5.6KWh per day. So that is as good a measure as I will get of our "base load"

[SteamyTea]

Since, and including the 7^th July, until, and including yesterday (20/07/2019), I used 79.3 kWh, what is and average of 5.7 kWh/day.

 

1 hour ago, ProDave said:

In that 2 weeks it used 39KWh per week or 5.6KWh per day

Isn't that 2.8 kWh/day

Edited July 21, 2019 by SteamyTea

[Ed Davies]

@SteamyTea, Nope, @ProDave said 39kWh per week.

[SteamyTea]

So he did, can see it clearly now I am back on the laptop, rather than the Kindle.

[joth]

On 14/07/2019 at 17:52, JSHarris said:

If you need an always-on PC, then there are some very low power, passively cooled ones about.  We have two of these, one with a Core i7-7500U, one with a Core i7-8550U.  Both sit at around 7 W most of the time, less than 1 W on standby, and never more than 15 W.  One has 8Gb of RAM, the other 16Gb, and both are fitted with Samsung Evo SSDs.  Although the Core i7-8550U is supposedly about twice as fast as the Core i7-7550U I can't say I've seen any difference at all between them.

 

As these machines have turned out to be reliable, low power and have reasonable performance, I've been thinking about buying one of the same companies multiple Gigabit Ethernet port machines as a firewall/router.  The company is Hystou, in China, and their basic kit seems very good, although best to get a barebones machine and fit decent RAM, SSD etc.  Also their WiFi cards are not great, but I removed these and blanked the antenna holes, as we have no need of WiFi, and removing the WiFi card reduces the power very slightly.

 

Just looking into NUCs again as I need to get one to run BlueIris. For this purpose  Quick Sync support is more important than clock speed. Both the ones you mention have it, in Kaby Lake micro architecture, so a good start (AIUI Kaby Lake is the minimum version needed for possible future H.265 hw acceleration) 

 

Looking at their aliexpress site, I like the bare-faced honesty in their marketing (copied below, their emphasis), although it does make me worry about the legitimacy of the rest of the components.
 

"Free Operating System: Default installed our activated OEM cracked version(not genuine, works good, but best not to update online) Win7/10 English for free"

Edited September 2, 2019 by joth

[Jeremy Harris]

39 minutes ago, joth said:

 

Just looking into NUCs again as I need to get one to run BlueIris. For this purpose  Quick Sync support is more important than clock speed. Both the ones you mention have it, in Kaby Lake micro architecture, so a good start (AIUI Kaby Lake is the minimum version needed for possible future H.265 hw acceleration) 

 

Looking at their aliexpress site, I like the bare-faced honesty in their marketing (copied below, their emphasis), although it does make me worry about the legitimacy of the rest of the components.
 

"Free Operating System: Default installed our activated OEM cracked version(not genuine, works good, but best not to update online) Win7/10 English for free"

 

 

It's why I bought just the barebones box, and fitted reasonably good brand-name RAM and SSD.  I've had the Core i7-7550U box running continuously for around 2 years now, without any glitches. The i7-8550U box is only a few months old but seems to be as well made as the other one (the reliability of the first box is what made me buy another one).  Because I bought bare boxes I didn't subject myself to the risk of dodgy software, either.

[SteamyTea]

As most if these small, but powerful, computers probably have a spare bit of capacity, how well would they work with thin clients (term may have changed now to Cloud something or other).

Be a lot less clutter on my desk to have just a monitor and keyboard.

Easy to move too.

Edited September 2, 2019 by SteamyTea

[Jeremy Harris]

26 minutes ago, SteamyTea said:

As most if these small, but powerful, computers probably have a spare bit of capacity, how well would they work with thin clients (term may have changed now to Cloud something or other).

Be a lot less clutter on my desk to have just a monitor and keyboard.

Easy to move too.

 

 

TBH I don't know.  These are about the same size as the thin client boxes we had when I was working, but at a guess would say they are a lot more powerful.  I don't know what our thin client boxes contained, but they barely needed to do anything as all the processing was done in the data centre.  We only used thin clients for security reasons - no storage on the desktop, encryption on the Ethernet link, and needing a security pass to be inserted in the thing to make it work, made it inherently pretty secure.  It also meant that there was no boot up delay, as everyone's VM was always running on one of the data centre servers (the data centre was on-site and physically secured).

 

The small fanless boxes I bought have a VESA mount available so they can just be screwed to the back of a monitor (one of ours is mounted this way):

 

 

 

[SteamyTea]

@JSHarris

I was actually thinking that these could do the donkey work and something very low powered would sit on desk.

It seems a shame to have loads of low power, but powerful computing and just run a simple task or two on them.

Edited September 2, 2019 by SteamyTea

[myozone]

Sorry to reinvigorate an old thread but seems more relevant with current prices. My base load is around 71 watts.

 

[SteamyTea]

3 minutes ago, myozone said:

My base load is around 71 watts.

Do you know what devices are causing that?

 

[J1mbo]

For those with smart meters, register them with loop - it will show the 'phantom load' and simulate the impact of solar and battery.

[myozone]

1 hour ago, SteamyTea said:

Do you know what devices are causing that?

 

Yes, pfSense router ~26 watts plus ~28 watts for 3 Raspberry PI's logging, Node-red and FreePBX(phone) network switch, ADSL modem plus all the other things in the house standby TV, two laptops, microwave, boiler timer, bedside clock etc.

 

Apparently the average base load in the UK is around 110 watts.

Edited March 1, 2022 by myozone

[SteamyTea]

21 minutes ago, myozone said:

Yes, pfSense router ~26 watts plus ~28 watts for 3 Raspberry PI's logging, Node-red and FreePBX(phone) network switch, ADSL modem plus all the other things in the house standby TV, two laptops, microwave, boiler timer, bedside clock etc.

 

Apparently the average base load in the UK is around 110 watts.

I have tried really hard to get rid of parasitic loads.  Now down to 0 W, 55% of thee time.

Easy for me as I live alone.

[Radian]

On 01/03/2022 at 13:43, myozone said:

Sorry to reinvigorate an old thread but seems more relevant with current prices. My base load is around 71 watts.

 

 

I win! I win! 🤣

 

 

 

[Wil]

baseload, I just can't seem to get below about 400W! CCTV server,UDM Pro various HA parasitics seem to be about 150-200W, Fridge freezer, gate charger, couple of trickle chargers seem to do the rest.

 

However now I've got the ASHPs for the heating HW, I used 2040kWh in Feb, so averaged a load of 3kWh permanantly! Pah to your puny 1.5kW average... 🤯

[joth]

4 hours ago, Wil said:

baseload, I just can't seem to get below about 400W! CCTV server,UDM Pro various HA parasitics seem to be about 150-200W, Fridge freezer, gate charger, couple of trickle chargers seem to do the rest.

 

+1

We were 200W pre-renovation, but the Ubiquiti gear and some CCTV (and, the Virgin Media router, no less) have added at least 100W. And working from home means more laptops & monitors on charge/standby which never seem to get to low power sleep as well as you imagine they should.

I need to re-audit everything and find out where it's really all going. A good spring-summer time project, when incidental heating is much less desirable!  The heating has just stopped coming on, so now is the time.

[SteamyTea]

I was just wondering how people are calculation their baseloads.

As I am bored, I decided to look at last year electrical energy distribution.  So two charts, one covers the lower 95% of my usage, the second does the top 5%.

Note that the y-axis scale changes.

So my usage is up to 200W, 85% of the time.  The heavy usages, DHW and space heating, accounts for 4.4% of the time.

 

 

[Radian]

19 hours ago, Wil said:

baseload, I just can't seem to get below about 400W! CCTV server,UDM Pro various HA parasitics seem to be about 150-200W, Fridge freezer, gate charger, couple of trickle chargers seem to do the rest.

 

However now I've got the ASHPs for the heating HW, I used 2040kWh in Feb, so averaged a load of 3kWh permanantly! Pah to your puny 1.5kW average... 🤯

 

OK, you win. 😫

Except, of course, I heat the house with gas. The only electric heating is in the theatre room (2kW resistive convector) which blips away night and day keeping it from going below 17C. 

 

1 hour ago, SteamyTea said:

So two charts, one covers the lower 95% of my usage, the second does the top 5%.

 

I should try that. Wondering if an inverse log scale for the Y axis might be useful?

[SteamyTea]

26 minutes ago, Radian said:

Wondering if an inverse log scale for the Y axis might be useful

I thought about doing that as well. Then thought as it is just counting to describe what is happening, there is no need to 'equationise' it for analytical purposes.

Your loads will be different from mine, so not easily transferable information.

The main thing is I do not have equipment on standby i.e TV, CCTV.

I basically use what I need when I need it.

[Benjseb]

We’ve just turned our heating off (ASHP) which was masking a fairly high base load… 900W!!

 

We do have a holiday let too which is all electric attached to same supply but the total never goes below 900W. 
 

Will be using a plug in meter over the next few weeks to see what’s using it. 
 

900W x 24 x 30 = 649kWh 

At 29p/kWh that’s £188 per month just for base load. 

[SteamyTea]

19 minutes ago, Benjseb said:

We do have a holiday let too which is all electric attached to same supply but the total never goes below 900W

Check the fridge/freezer in it.  I noticed that my consumption was up when the fridge went faulty (gas leak and the compressor was constantly running).

If you have TV/entertainment equipment, check that out to.