Standby power: the 10% of your bill you can't see

Standby power is the bill nobody decided to pay. It's the steady trickle of electricity that appliances draw while they're switched off, idle, or just sitting there with a clock glowing - and across a whole house, running every hour of every day, it commonly adds up to 5-10% of a NZ power bill. That's $150-$300 a year for many homes, spent on devices doing precisely nothing.

The frustrating part is that you can't see it. There's no slider to turn down, no obvious appliance to blame - just a baseline hum that's been built into your bill without you ever noticing. The good news is that a fair chunk of it is easy to switch off once you know where to look.

The usual culprits

Standby load clusters around a few predictable places. None of them is dramatic on its own; the problem is that they run continuously and there are several of them.

• The entertainment cluster. A TV, soundbar, set-top box and streaming stick all idle together, often near a games console. Five devices at 2-5W each is a small space heater's worth of idle draw running 24/7.
• Console rest mode. A PlayStation or Xbox left in "rest" or "instant-on" can pull 10-15W around the clock to download updates and wake quickly. That's one of the single biggest phantom loads in a typical home.
• Microwave and oven clocks. The display and clock on a microwave or wall oven sip 2-3W forever - often more over a year than the appliance uses doing its actual job.
• Chargers left plugged in. Phone and laptop bricks draw a little even with nothing attached. Individually trivial; collectively a few watts in every room.
• Instant-on coffee machines. Some keep a boiler warm so they're ready on demand - convenient, but it's a heating element on standby, which is far from trivial.

How to find yours

You don't need to guess. There are two practical ways to measure the phantom load in your own home:

• Read the meter at night. Once everyone's in bed and nothing is actively running, your meter is showing close to your baseline draw - fridge, router, and all the standby loads combined. Watch how fast it ticks over. Anything above a couple of hundred watts overnight is worth investigating.
• Use a plug-in power meter. A $20-30 plug-in meter from a hardware store tells you exactly what a device draws while idle. Plug your TV unit or console in for a day and the number will probably surprise you.

What to actually do about it

The fix is mostly about cutting power to the clusters that don't need to be live overnight, without making life annoying.

• Switchable power boards. Put the whole entertainment cluster on one board and flick it off at night or when you're out. One switch kills five phantom loads at once. This is the single most effective move.
• Turn off console rest mode. In the settings, set the console to fully power down rather than sleep. You'll wait a little longer to start up, but you stop paying for 24/7 idle. Schedule updates for when it's already on.
• Unplug what you never use. The second TV in the spare room, the spare phone charger, the printer that runs once a month - if it lives on standby and earns nothing, pull the plug.

What's NOT worth chasing

Standby advice gets silly fast, so it's worth being clear about what to leave alone. Some always-on devices are earning their keep, and switching them off saves cents while costing you convenience.

• The fridge. A fridge-freezer isn't on standby - it's working. Turning it off spoils food and saves nothing useful. (A second garage fridge half-full of nothing, on the other hand, is fair game.)
• The router. A Wi-Fi router draws around 10-12W and runs your whole home network, smart devices and security cameras. Switching it off nightly saves maybe a dollar or two a year and re-syncs your connection every morning. Not worth it.
• Anything with a battery that needs topping up - hardwired alarms, some medical devices. Leave them be.

The worked example

Let's tally a fairly ordinary home's phantom load and turn it into a dollar figure at 42c/kWh. The formula throughout is the same: watts ÷ 1000 × 24 hours × 365 days × $0.42.

The maths on the console row: 12 W ÷ 1000 × 24 × 365 = 105 kWh, and 105 × $0.42 = $44 a year for a switched-off games console. Sum the lot and this not-unusual home is spending around $146 a year - close to $12 a month - on appliances that aren't doing anything. Switch off the entertainment board and the console rest mode alone and you claw back roughly half of that for the price of one power board and thirty seconds in a settings menu.

Work out your own number

Your phantom load depends on how many gadgets you run and your region's rate. Add a phantom load line to the NZ Power Bill Calculator to see how much of your bill is being spent on standby - and which always-on devices are the worst offenders.

Related guides

• The most expensive appliances in NZ homes - where the big always-on loads sit
• Average NZ power bill by region (2026) - the baseline standby chips away at
• Day/night power plans - another way to cut the cost of always-on load