Thinking About Smart Home Power Usage

My personal guess would be that the settings are stored either on the Hue hub or within the app you use to connect to it. Mostly because, I've noticed, after someone turns off my Hue bulbs by accident by flipping the switch and then turns them on, they don't get restored to the same scene setting as they were before. I have to manually change back to the scene it was on before being powered off.

On another hand, after reading some articles a while ago that mentioned security issues surrounding smart bulbs (when it comes to selling them to someone after using them in your own home due to some persisted settings), I bet that your theory could be correct as well.

Are you in the Milwaukee area by chance? Funny that you post this today, We Energies just called me today to notify me they were installing a new meter for our unit.

> ... and "anything that generates heat" would contribute significantly to reductions.

I never measured it, but there was one area that I quickly put a Tasmota plug on. My stereo receiver under the TV.

One day I was putting around the den and I noticed a lot of heat emanating from the credenza under the TV. It was my Sony receiver just sitting there, dutifully amplifying the null input from the turned-off TV.

So I added the plug, and told Home Assistant to turn the receiver on whenever the TV was on, and turn it off when the TV is off. My guess is that I'm saving 20-40W this way. $2-$4 a month.

(FWIW, this is the first time I've ever been glad to have a "smart" TV. The only feature I use on that TV is the ability for Home Assistant to see it)

My utility also installed smart meters recently - the Focus AXRe with Gridstream RF. It theoretically has Zigbee in it. It even has the Zigbee logo on it. I haven't figured out if I can read it yet, but in fairness I also haven't put a lot of work into figuring it out either. At the very least I could not get Smartthings to see it. So if anybody knows anything more about this meter I would love to know. :)

But I DID discover that my utility, buried down in like 5 menus on some random screen of the account portal, offers a usage graph at 15 minute intervals. It's not real time - it seems to be delayed by 1-3 hours - but it is far better than getting a surprise bill. And while it used some weird SAP JSON interface, I could deduce what was what and could get the data out of it.

So I whipped up a script to basically scrape this "API" and shove the data into InfluxDB. I also added daily scrapes for the billing page and the rate page so I know when I was billed and how much the current rate is. This is because my utility bills at a lower rate for the first 1,400 kwh, and a higher rate for everything over that. I was not able to discern any pattern to when the bills were issued and the utility company was very unhelpful in this regard, just "sometime ever 27 to 35 days depending on holidays and weekends."

This [0] is the result of combining all the data. While I would really like realtime data directly off the meter, even being delayed a few hours is better than a random surprise $370 bill. I've written enough scrapers in my life to know it will probably break at some point, but it's been humming along nicely for the last few months.

[0] https://imgur.com/a/SwdHnCV

> but all these always on devices have to be costing something right?

They probably are; that depends on how badly they're designed. But that doesn't mean they should.

Consumer devices aren't usually as efficient as they could be with some more design work, which I think makes people have a wrong reference point about how much power is needed to do things. As a counterexample and a way to reset the reference, consider e.g.:

- That there exist radio devices that are designed to run for years off a single CR2032 battery.

- That there are microcontrollers that can still execute your code while drawing nanoamps.

- My 9 m.o. kid has a plush moon with a string attached to it; when you pull it, it plays a loud melody (that part is mechanical) and flashes LEDs for ~30 seconds. Both are powered from the mechanical energy of your pull.

The way I see it, a typical device on standby and/or a typical wall wart not charging anything shouldn't pull more than some micro- or even nanowatts. So they shouldn't cost you more than a hundredth of a cent a month each. Now of course they do, there are probably some engineering constraints here (like more complicated devices wanting to keep RAM powered), and there are definitely business constraints (low-power design is more expensive). But to me, a device whose standby mode is noticeable on the power bill is simply broken.