The hidden cost of doing nothing

Standby mode is the politest way your appliances can waste money. Nothing is on, nothing is happening, and yet a small trickle of electricity keeps flowing through the plug. Individually it looks trivial. Collectively, it can quietly add £50 to £80 a year to a typical household bill — and considerably more in a home full of gadgets.

The arithmetic is worth seeing once, because it changes how you think about the socket behind the telly. A device drawing a steady 10 watts costs you roughly 88 kilowatt-hours over a year. At around 25p per kilowatt-hour, that's about £22 annually for something you aren't using. Ten such devices, and you've paid for a decent weekend away. The good news is that trimming this waste is mostly a one-off effort followed by a habit or two — no rewiring, no sacrifice, and nothing that makes your home less comfortable.

Find your worst offenders first

Not all standby power is created equal. A modern television might idle at well under 1 watt, which is genuinely negligible. Older satellite and set-top boxes, by contrast, can draw 10 to 20 watts because they keep a dish connection and a recording schedule alive. Games consoles sitting in an "instant on" or rest mode are another common culprit, and anything with a lit display, a clock or a glowing logo is quietly helping itself.

A useful rule of thumb: if it is warm to the touch when it should be idle, it is drawing meaningful power. If it responds instantly to a remote control, it is listening — and listening costs something. If it has a screen, a light or a whirring fan that never quite stops, it belongs on your list.

Many UK libraries lend plug-in energy monitors, and they are inexpensive to buy. Plug one between the appliance and the socket, leave it for a day, and you'll know exactly what that device costs you per year. Ten minutes of measuring beats an hour of guessing.

Put timers and switched leads to work

The simplest fix for a cluster of devices is a switched extension lead. Group the television, set-top box, soundbar and games console onto one lead, and a single flick at bedtime turns off the lot. No crawling behind furniture, no unplugging, no losing your settings.

• Use a timer plug for things you only want on at certain hours — a printer, a games console or a charging corner.
• Use a smart plug with a schedule if you'd rather automate it, or if the sockets are hard to reach.
• Label your leads so other people in the house know which switch does what. A strip of masking tape and a marker prevents a lot of confusion.
• Leave alone anything that genuinely needs to run: fridge-freezers, central heating controls, alarm systems and any medical equipment. If you rely on your broadband overnight for a smart heating system or monitoring device, keep the router on.

Tackle the entertainment corner

This is usually where the money hides. Dig into the settings menus and you'll often find a "quick start" or "fast start" option that keeps the television half-awake so it boots faster. Turning it off costs you a few seconds at switch-on and saves a few watts all day. Similarly, most games consoles have an energy-saving or low-power standby mode that uses a fraction of the power of instant-on. You may wait a little longer for a system update, and that is the whole trade.

Set-top boxes deserve particular attention because they are often the thirstiest item in the room and the easiest to forget. If yours records programmes on a schedule, check whether it can wake itself for recordings rather than staying permanently alert. Many can. And if a box is more than a few years old, its standby consumption may be several times that of a current model — worth knowing when you next replace it.

Don't overlook the kitchen, the office and the spare room

Small devices add up quickly because there are so many of them. A microwave clock, a coffee machine with a digital display, a washing machine or tumble dryer left showing a lit programme, a dishwasher waiting in standby — each might only draw one to three watts, but they run for 8,760 hours a year.

The spare room is often worse. Printers frequently sit in a warm standby for weeks between jobs, drawing 5 to 10 watts while they wait for something that isn't coming. Desktop computers, monitors, speakers and desk lamps on a single switched lead solve that in one movement. Phone and laptop chargers left plugged in with nothing attached draw very little these days, but a dozen of them still add up — and it takes no effort to pull them out.

Turn it into a routine, not a project

None of this works if it only happens once. The trick is to attach the new habit to something you already do. A single switch-off sweep at bedtime takes under a minute: one lead in the living room, one in the study, one in the kitchen corner. Children pick this up quickly when they can see the meter — or the smart display — ticking over more slowly.

Revisit it every few months. New gadgets arrive, settings reset themselves after updates, and a device that behaved last winter may have quietly changed its ways. A brief check each season keeps the savings coming, and the total is rarely as small as people expect. Cutting standby power won't heat your home or power your car, but it is the easiest energy saving available to almost every UK household — and it starts at the wall socket.