Your electronics could be costing you, even while off. Here’s one way to check

Smart Wi-Fi power strips are a great way to save on your power bill. But do they pay for themselves?

Adrian Kingsley-Hughes/ZDNET

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ZDNET’s key takeaways

• Leaving devices plugged and switched on can be wasteful.
• Monitoring usage and remote switching helps reduce bills.
• This Tapo smart power strip is a great option to monitor power consumption, and at $45, it pays for itself. 

I have three 3D printers that are on the go a lot of the time. I use them to make everything from replacement car parts to signs, and I even print material for local businesses. What’s even better, I can print both when I’m physically there with the printers or remotely (yes, I can send projects to print from my iPhone — what a time we live in!).

And because of this convenience of remote printing, I got into the habit of leaving everything on. Not all the time, but a lot of the time. After all, it’s convenient. And the times I did turn them off, I got annoyed because I couldn’t use them remotely.

And because each printer has different filaments and capabilities, I couldn’t just keep one on. I needed all three to be on. 

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Then, one day, I was ideally thinking about power consumption of random household and workshop devices, and my eye shifted to my 3D printers. I mean, these things have lights and motors and heaters inside. They had to use a reasonable amount of power when they’re making stuff, but what about when they’re just sitting there doing nothing?

I pulled out my power meter and decided to investigate. What I discovered wasn’t bad, but it wasn’t great either. Each of the three 3D printer — complete with the filament switchers, each has two installed — consumed about an average of 50W in standby.

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So, between them that’s 75W. I did some back of the envelope calculations that the printers were on standby for about 12 hours a day, say for six days a week, and the power consumption adds up.

I worked out the power consumption for the past three months, and it was ballpark of 80 kWh. The average US cost of this much power is about $15. Not a huge amount, but it’s still $60 a year, it’s wasteful, and money that could be better spent elsewhere.

For three large, industrial printers, that’s cheap. Even if I kept them on 24/7/365, they’d only cost about $140. Modern electronics are incredibly efficient.

So, I bought a smart power strip. I went with the Tapo branded smart Wi-Fi power strip because I’ve had good experience with the company’s products (Tapo is a TP-Link brand, which is a company that’s been making Wi-Fi routers and accessories for years). 

The US version of this smart strip has six outlets (the UK version only has four) that can be controlled using an app or physically, and as well as being able to let you control each outlet separately, the app does cool stuff like monitor power consumption and live usage. 

And if you don’t have a separate power meter – something like this or this — these smart outlets offer a handy way to measure power consumption.

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And it only cost me $45, so it’ll pay for itself in about a year. But, I hear you wondering, how much does that smart outlet cost to run 24/7/365? Pennies a month. Less than $3 a year.

Sure, not negligible, especially if you have a few of them in your home, but this is better than leaving things on all the time, and more convenient than having to be at home or the workshop to physically turn the switch on.

I don’t mind paying that $3 convenience tax.