You are very lucky to have power as cheap as you do. I have been measuring the idle power consumption of every device in my home - over 100 of them. It really adds up quickly.
One of my primary uses for HomeAssistant is to control power consumption and automatically turn things off with smartplugs that measure wattage and turn devices off when warranted. For example, when my home theater receiver drops below 5 watts, HAOS can turn off the 4 subwoofers - 1 in each corner of the room - that each consume about 10 watts idle in so-called “auto” mode, or 40 watts for the se of 4. For this particular case I have HAOS also automatically turn the subs on, when the receiver’s power consumption gets over 50 watts, which means I manually turned it on with the remote.
In this case, there are 5 smartplugs involved that consume 0.6W in the off state, and 1.1W in the on state. The smartplug on the receiver is always on - the other 4 normally off. So, the 5 smartplugs involved consume 3.5W year round, which has to be deducted from the 40 watt savings. The net savings is 37.5W. That’s 328 kWh per year. And at 30 cents/kWh, $98/year purely wasted. The smartplugs have a fixed one-time cost of $15+tax each, also, or about $82. That means the smartplugs will pay back for themselves in less than a year.
This is just one of many automations I use to reduce unnecessary power consumption.
Unfortunately, 2 of the most energy-consuming plug-in appliances I have are built-in - my 48" Monogram side-by-side refrigerator, and a built-in Monogram wine cooler. I can’t easily access the plug to put an energy monitor smartplug on them. I can probably manage to pull out the wine cooler, but the 48" refrigerator is just a beast. There is no automation HAOS could perform with it, I’m not going to ever turn it off. However, with the monitoring smartplug, it could detect when there is increased power consumption, which can indicate something is wrong, for example with the thermostat, or door left ajar, or the vents at the top need to be cleaned.
As a matter of fact, my 13-year old, 20cu ft Energy Star rated Kenmore freezer had double the daily kWh consumption yesterday than it does usually - 3 kWh instead of 1.5 kWh. Something apparently went wrong with the door seal at 4am on Saturday. I discovered it at 10pm when I went to get some food from it. A lot of the food went bad, unfortunately. I wish HAOS could have sent me an alert earlier about the increased wattage. It is easy to see on the power curve after the fact - the freezer stopped cycling on and off. Having the freezer never go to 0W for an extended period is something I could have used an HAOS automation to detect, and which I’m going to program for all the appliances that cycle on and off. Strangely enough, the freezer started cycling again on Sunday afternoon around 3pm. I’m not putting any more pricey Haagen Dasz ice cream or Prime beef in that freezer, though, until I know what’s wrong with, and either repair or replace it.
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