The decoder hums and the bill notices: standby power, measured on your own meter, not quoted from a chart

Standby power is the bill's smallest villain and the most exaggerated one - the threads promise a haunting and the electricians shrug, because the honest answer is that a house's idle load is small per brick, sneaky in sum, and perfectly measurable by the household in ten minutes with the meter it already owns. This page skips the borrowed figures and does the arithmetic on your own house: which habits the measurement actually justifies, and which are folklore worth retiring.

What the idle boxes really do

A decoder in standby is a computer waiting to be woken - it keeps its tuner, its network and its memory warm, and that floor of continuous draw is the standby class the meter will show you. The television's fast-boot models never truly sleep either; the console and the stereo with the glowing dot are the same waiting logic. What idle draws less than folklore says: modern chargers with nothing on the other end (the transformer sips where the old iron ones burned), the led bulbs' negligible off-time, the router that never sleeps because the household forbids it. What still costs like the folklore: the old fridge in the store room with the door's failing seal (a compressor that cycles in the heat is the meter's loudest hum, and the room's ambient is its throttle - the coils and seal paragraphs of the fridge guide apply to the second fridge exactly as to the first), and anything with a heating element on a thermostat - the water heater's keep-warm habit is the standby load that dwarfs every little glowing dot in the house combined, and this desk's hot-water page states its switch-off case in full.

The meter test, because your figures beat every chart

1. The quiet ten minutes: at night, everything the household can safely off at the wall - decoders, televisions, consoles, the kitchen's little boxes - router and fridge staying on. Read the meter's pulse or the daily-usage screen's rate before and after; the difference is the house's true idle floor, in your tariff's own units.
2. The one-box test: to see what a single device's standby costs, that device alone, off at its wall switch, same before-after reading over an hour - the number the forum argues about becomes the number in your notebook, and the multiplication (per day, times the tariff, times the year) decides whether a habit or a product is worth it.
3. The annualisation rule that stops the guilt: small loads are per-year numbers; the decoder's idle that costs a month's phone credit over twelve months is real but not the bill's driver - the heater and the second fridge are the drivers, and the meter's daily figures across a fortnight show which category a complaint belongs to before any switch gets bought.

The switching habits that pay

• The heater's own switch off at the wall when the house sleeps, the tank's insulation's job instead of its element's - the hot-water page's standing line, repeated here as the house's single largest idle decision.
• The strip with switches, not the strip that is a plug: one night-tap kills the whole entertainment cluster's waiting, and the strip's own cost repays the season the meter shows - the desk's honest unit: strips that never get switched are decoration.
• The decoder's standby versus its full off, where the remote and the scheduler's updates matter, is a feature trade, not a savings scandal - measure it once and stop arguing about it; the old class of boxes that draw their running-watts idle (the brick that is warm in the hand while 'off') is the one the strip saves properly.
• The second fridge's winter load: the store-room box that runs a compressor alone in an empty building is switched by its contents' honesty; the drinks habit belongs to the evening and the kitchen's unit, and the meter's quiet-ten-minutes test on that room's circuit ends the decade of 'but it's small'.

The verdict, as a rule

Measure your own idle floor before buying any of the internet's remedies: the heater's thermostat and the sweating second fridge are the standby bills in disguise; the little glowing dots are the meter's footnote, real, small and now quantified. The habit that captures most of the money costs one wrist per night - the strip switch at the television's cluster - and the rest of the folklore the test retires is folklore the house was already allowed to stop carrying.