Loading page
About this tool
Add up what always-on and standby devices cost you every year, ranked by the worst offender in your home.
Standby power is the electricity a device draws while it is switched off but still plugged in, and this calculator turns your own list of devices into a rupee figure per year. Each line uses the same arithmetic — watts × quantity × idle hours per day × 365 ÷ 1000 — and the result is ranked so the worst offender is obvious. The ranking usually surprises people: a phone charger left in the socket draws under 0.1 W, while a DTH set-top box in standby can draw 15 W around the clock.
Open Standby Power Cost Calculator 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.
Devices are sorted by annual cost, so you can see that one set-top box outweighs a dozen chargers.
Starting values come from published standby measurements rather than guesses, and every one stays editable.
A quiet 25 W baseline looks trivial per month and substantial across the life of the appliances.
A typical home with a set-top box, a router, a TV, a microwave and a couple of ACs wastes roughly 230 units a year, which is about ₹1,860 at ₹8 a unit. Homes with an inverter on float charge, a gaming console or several always-on devices can easily double that.
In most Indian homes it is the DTH or cable set-top box, at roughly 15 W even when the TV is off — around 110 units and ₹880 a year on its own. Home inverters on float charge and Wi-Fi routers are the next largest, while modern televisions have been driven below 0.5 W by efficiency rules.
Barely. A modern charger with no phone attached draws under 0.1 W, which comes to under 1 unit a year — a few rupees. The habit is harmless, but it saves roughly a hundredth of what switching off a set-top box does.
It is the International Energy Agency's target that appliances should draw no more than 1 watt in standby, which most modern electronics now meet. Anything measuring well above 1 W in standby is either old, or is not truly idle — it is listening, recording or charging, and is worth switching off at the socket.
Add the Standby Power Cost Calculatorwidget to your blog or website — free, responsive, no signup. Just keep the “Widget by AltFTool” credit link visible.
<iframe src="https://www.altftool.com/embed/widget/standby-power-cost-calculator"
title="Standby Power Cost Calculator — free AltFTool widget"
width="100%" height="640" style="border:0;border-radius:12px;overflow:hidden"
loading="lazy" referrerpolicy="no-referrer-when-downgrade"></iframe>
<p style="font-size:12px;margin:4px 0 0">Widget by <a href="https://www.altftool.com/tools/all/standby-power-cost-calculator?utm_source=embed&utm_medium=widget">AltFTool — free online tools</a></p>