Home Standby Power Calculator
Select the devices you leave plugged in, adjust your electricity price, and see how much always-on power may cost per month and year.
Average US electricity rate is around $0.16/kWh. Use your bill rate if you know it.
The watt values shown for each device are average standby-power estimates based on typical household electronics. Actual power usage may vary by brand, model, age, and settings. You can edit any watt value to better match your own device if you know the actual power consumption.
Your always-on devices may cost about $84.10 per year.
Try the Energy Quiz
Home Energy Quiz — find your biggest electricity drains
Standby power and always-on devices can quietly push your electric bill up by 10–20%. This quick quiz helps identify the biggest wasters in your home.
What Is Standby Power?
Standby power — sometimes called phantom load, vampire power, or idle current — is the electricity a device draws when it's plugged in but not actively in use. Almost every modern appliance keeps a small circuit alive so it can respond to a remote, check the network, hold a clock, or wake instantly. Individually those watts feel trivial, but they run 24 hours a day, 365 days a year.
A device that pulls just 5 watts in standby uses about 44 kWh per year. At average U.S. rates that's around $7 — for one device. The typical home has dozens of always-plugged electronics: routers, TVs, set-top boxes, game consoles, smart speakers, monitors, printers, chargers, microwaves, and coffee machines. Stacked together, standby power often accounts for 5–10% of a household's entire electric bill.
The devices that hurt the most are the ones with heating elements or motors that cycle even in idle mode — espresso machines that keep a boiler warm, water heaters in vacation mode, furnace blowers in off-season standby, and older set-top boxes that never really sleep. A single always-warm appliance can cost more per year than ten low-draw electronics combined.
The good news: standby waste is one of the easiest line items to cut. Smart plugs and power strips with master switches let you fully kill power to entertainment centers and office desks the moment you stop using them. Timers can shut down routers, printers, and chargers overnight. Modern PCs and monitors hit sub-watt draw in sleep mode if you enable it. And for devices you rarely use — the second printer, the guest-room TV, the off-season treadmill — simply unplugging until needed eliminates the cost entirely.
Run the calculator above with your actual electricity price (check your bill — it's usually $0.12–$0.30/kWh depending on region) to see where your own home's standby load is concentrated, then target the biggest contributors first.