The Topic of Power Saving and IOT

I regularly use Smart Sockets to save power on various devices – been doing it for years and never given it a second thought.

I was just today pondering the fly-killer we run all day every day in our living room. Now, let’s say we have a standard LED UV fly killer… I just checked and these use around 3W. Well, they are utterly useless in daylight as the flies head to the light – and if the fly-killer is no-where near as bright as internal room lights or indeed sunshine, there is no incentive for them to head off to their death when the ceiling or window is more interesting.

3W may not sound a lot but do the math – that ends up at 26KW/H over a year.. and right now in 2022 that’s not quite as irrelevant as it was a couple of years back. So, I hit on the bright idea of attaching a SMART SOCKET. Let’s for now ignore the likelyhood that the Smart socket cost probably outweighs the potential savings – indeed why don’t I just say “Let’s say you have an old Smart Socket lying around”.

Good – BUT the average WiFi Smart Socket uses maybe 1-2w (if you make sure the little LED LIGHT if fitted is turned off). So really you’re not even saving that much. But hold on – what about Zigbee Smart sockets? It seems these take as little as 0.3w – THAT’s more like it.

Let’s back up a little – what’s wrong with good old-fashioned wall timers? The really cheap mechanical ones – a few € (Euros in my case) are uttely useless for any long-term project because they are blissfully unaware of power cuts – the first cut and they are out of sync and this accumulates. It amazes me the number of people who don’t know this.

Alternatively there are commonplace LCD wall timers – which have internally a real time clock – which rarely handles summer/winter time correctly but at LAST it seems the EU (for example) are about to ditch that past-its-sell-by-date bi-annual changeover – these timers will be fairly low power but for the life of me I can’t find it printed on the back of any of mine. But it seems we can forget these timers – according to this site – their mechanical timers typically take 1W per hour, the LCD versions take more.

This subject was merely something I’ve thought about over the years but never progressed. There is of course another element – in the case of UV lights – reducing the number of active hours could increase their lifespan and that applies to both the old tube-base lights and the more modern LED-based versions to a (possibly) lesser extent.

Of course if we’re talking about something more power-hungry like a heater or motor or powerful lamp – that’s another story.

In the area between ultra-low-power devices and say phone/tablet chargers – there could be yet another angle to this…. using, for example, a Zigbee wall socket, if it were possible to limit the phone charge to 85% – this could actually be worthwhile – the cost of the socket would still seem to be a problem unless you factor in the phone battery life – improved by NOT charging to 100% every time.

Now, on a typical Android phone it should be possible for the technically inclined to simply use TASKER to send an alert to whatever controls your Zigbee devices and have the wall charger turn off when the battery is at the desired less-than-100% charge. There are many articles out there on the benefits of NOT fully charging phone batteries.

Comments welcome as long as they aren’t rude 🙂

See comments below about Samsung S22 Ultra charging – solved for me – solutions for non-Samsung phones welcome… where would I be without helpful subscribers 🙂