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About this tool
Add up the standby and active power of every smart device and hub in your home, with daily kWh, running cost and the always-on vampire load.
This budget totals what a connected home actually costs to run, calculating each device as qty x (active watts x active hours + standby watts x the remaining hours of the day), then rolling that up to kWh per day, month and year at your tariff. The number most people have never seen is the always-on figure: the sum of standby watts, which is what the house draws with nobody home. It is built for anyone who has added hubs, cameras, bulbs and speakers one at a time and wants to know what the pile of them adds to the bill.
Open Smart Home Power Budget on AltFTool — it loads instantly in your browser.
Enter the values you already know.
Fine-tune the options to match your scenario.
Read the result and use it in your planning or reporting.
Separates idle draw from active use so you can see the share you never chose to spend.
Sorts devices by daily watt-hours, so the fix is obvious rather than guessed at.
Starts from typical measured watts for routers, hubs, cameras, bulbs and docks.
A typical setup of a router, mesh node, hub, two speakers, eight smart bulbs, two cameras and a smart TV lands around 0.6 to 1.2 kWh a day, of which roughly 15 to 30% is pure standby. The router, cameras and any always-on server usually dominate; individual bulbs and plugs are small.
About 0.5 W, so roughly 4.4 kWh a year each — small alone, but ten of them is a permanent 5 W load. A smart plug only saves energy if the thing it controls draws more in standby than the plug itself.
Yes, continuously, because they keep a Wi-Fi or Zigbee radio alive to stay reachable. EU Ecodesign Regulation 1275/2008 caps ordinary standby at 0.5 W, but networked standby is permitted a higher allowance, which is why a camera or hub idles at 2-4 W rather than a fraction of a watt.
Group entertainment and office devices onto one switchable strip, drop always-on cameras to motion-triggered recording, retire spare mesh nodes you added but do not need, and measure the biggest suspects with a plug-in energy meter before replacing anything. Leave safety devices such as alarms and doorbells powered.
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