Looking into Household Gear's Standby Power Stats
Submitted by Matt on Thu, 08/06/2009 - 15:58
Lawrence Berkley National Laboratory (LBNL) has a site for standby power issues, which states that standby (sometimes called "vampire" or "phantom" power) is "typically 5-10% of residential electricity use in most developed countries."
LBNL does not make public its underlying analysis for that statement and a number of people have questioned it, so I've applied the consistency modeling techniques I use for clients to this problem. Here is the result.
| Average US Household (HH) Energy Use | 11,232 | KWh/year | EIA 2007 figure |
| 7.50% | Midpoint of 5%-10% from LBNL standby site | ||
| Annual HH Standby Consumption | 842.4 | KWh/HH/year | |
| Annual HH Standby Cost | $90.14 | US$/HH / year | Using $0.107/KWh |
| Standby Devices | 40* | devices/HH | from LBNL standy site and include kitchen appliances with standby modes (e.g. coffee maker with clock & timer), etc. |
| Average Annual Standby Consumption per Device | 21.1 | KWh/HH/year | |
| Average Annual Standby Hours per Device | 4,380 | Hours/year | Assume average of 12 hours per device per day in standby (not in use or not completely off) |
| Average Hourly Standby Consumption per Device | 4.8 | W |
* Interestingly, while LBNL implies that 40 devices per HH yields 5%-10% standby consumption, the IEA assigns the same consumption to 20 devices. If the above table used the IEA number of 20, the average per device standby consumption would rise to an extraordinary 9.6W.
Those standby watts per device numbers seem high, although it appears to be the logical result of the model. I'll update when I receive clarification from either organization on the underlying sources and analysis for their numbers.
(Thank you to @open4energy for reviewing these calculations.)
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