Every so often, I think about how much electric power my house consumes at all hours, even when it’s the dead of night and nothing is really being used. So this morning, I went out and flipped each breaker off, one by one slowly, while watching the instantaneous kilowatt reading on the electric meter and taking observations.

This took about 20 minutes for all circuits, and then I honed in on the suspicious circuits, the ones which don’t have a known appliance like a fridge which should always be running. Years ago, when I moved into this house, I drew out a map which describes which outlets and appliances belong to which circuit.

The two suspicious circuits were the living room and bedroom circuits, and armed with a Kill-o-watt, I ended up finding that my very old Bose Companion 5 desktop speakers will draw 23 Watts doing absolutely zilch. And my 2018-era Roku TCL so-called “smart” TV draws 20 Watts when it’s “off”.

I’ve been meaning to replace the Bose speakers – due to a separate issue where the mute button only works half the time, and horrific Linux support – and a friend recently offered to sell me some reference speakers that I can pair with a Class D amplifier, one which has a physical on/off switch.

For the TV, I’m not exactly sure what to replace it with, since I was going to wait until it died and replace it with a commercial-spec display, one that has no remnants of “smart TV” anything. I don’t allow my TV to even have a network connection or WiFi, so it really shouldn’t be doing anything. So I guess in the meantime, I’ll just pull the plug when I’m not watching; at least it’s easy to reach.

EDIT: the TV is now showing inconsistent results. It will occasionally drop down to a more-reasonable 0.1 Watt. But it might also remain at the aforementioned 20 Watts. Not entirely sure what it’s doing, whether just sitting there or staying on for a while after turning “off” the TV.