I called PCS and their switches in do nothing mode draw about 1/4 watt.
I called PCS and their switches in do nothing mode draw about 1/4 watt.
I hadn't considered this too much, but that's not totally insignificant. 60 switches at .25W is 15 Watts... 15W for 24 hours a day times 30 days is 10.8 KWH... I pay about 11 cents per KWH, so thats about $1.18 a month. It's not a huge cost, but my power bill last month was only about $90... so this is a bit more than 1 percent of it... That's assuming my X10 and ZWave switches draw about the same amount of power. Hmm... maybe I'll pull out the Kill-A-Watt tonight and see what I can find out about those switches.
Brett
I've got around 55 switches in my own place which burns around 396 watts continuously! That's about $65 monthly at my electric rate and about the same draw as my entire equipment rack... did I do my math correctly :blink:
I've got around 55 switches in my own place which burns around 396 watts continuously! That's about $65 monthly at my electric rate and about the same draw as my entire equipment rack... did I do my math correctly :blink:
I think so if you're paying about 23 cents per KWH. Those numbers really surprise me, though... and I was thinking 1/4 of a watt was a bit high. I'm definitely going to be testing some of my switches later tonight.
Brett
I've got this little dimmer demo unit I made (see below), so it was easy to pull the airgap on the switches and test each one individually.
Insteon = .06A, 7.2 watts
Lutron RadioRA = 4.8 watts, 4.8 watts
HAI Gen II UPB = .06A, 7.2 watts
SAI UPB = .06A, 7.2W
What are you using to measure consumption? I wired a switch to a plug to measure Leviton's Z-Wave devices,
and I plugged it into a Kill A Watt. I was able to get some good readings, but the resolution of the K-A-W is only 1 VA. I left the device on for 24hrs to get a reasonable estimate of power consumed.
Switch A VA PF W
X10 Appliance Module .01 1.2 .02 0.02
X10 Lamp Module .01 1.2 .02 0.02
ACT RS104 .10 12.0 .05 0.6
ACT RD104 .12 14.4 .06 0.9
ACT RD134 .10 12.0 .10 1.2
ACT ZDW103 .04 4.8 .11 0.5
I've got around 55 switches in my own place which burns around 396 watts continuously! That's about $65 monthly at my electric rate and about the same draw as my entire equipment rack... did I do my math correctly :blink:
I think so if you're paying about 23 cents per KWH. Those numbers really surprise me, though... and I was thinking 1/4 of a watt was a bit high. I'm definitely going to be testing some of my switches later tonight.
Brett
Gang,
I thought the numbers I came back were really high too!
Gang,
I thought the numbers I came back were really high too!
I suspect you may be forgetting about power factor. For non-resistive AC W=V*A*PF. From my measurements (see above) the power factor was pretty low, so I suspect that this may lower your wattage numbers quite a bit. You can get the PF measurement from your Kill-A-Watt also.
Brett