Before buying anything, before switching tariff, before comparing heat pumps, there is one measurement that tells you more about your electricity bill than any other. What does your house draw at three o'clock in the morning, when everybody is asleep and nothing should be running?
That figure is your standing load, and almost nobody guesses it correctly. In our experience most households assume something like fifty watts and discover two hundred, three hundred, sometimes more. At three hundred watts continuous, you are paying for roughly 2,600 kilowatt-hours a year before anyone has turned anything on.
Why the baseline matters more than the peak
Big loads feel expensive because they are visible. The kettle draws three kilowatts and you can hear it. But the kettle runs for two minutes, and the thing drawing eighty watts runs for 8,760 hours a year.
The arithmetic is worth internalising because it changes where you look. One watt of continuous draw is 8.76 kilowatt-hours a year. So a device drawing ten watts constantly costs about the same annually as boiling the kettle roughly three hundred times. Standing load is unglamorous and it is where a surprising share of a bill lives.
How to find yours
The easiest route, if you have a P1 port
In the Netherlands and Belgium virtually every modern meter has a P1 port — a standardised socket that streams live readings. Plug in a dongle, look at the reading in the small hours, and you have your answer in two minutes with no electrical work. Norway and parts of Scandinavia have an equivalent HAN port. Our energy meter guide covers the options.
The manual route, which costs nothing
No monitor at all? Read your meter at eleven at night and again at six in the morning, note the difference in kilowatt-hours, and divide by seven hours. That gives your average draw over that period in kilowatts. It is less precise than continuous monitoring and entirely sufficient to tell you whether you have a problem.
The clamp route
Where there is no meter port, a clamp-on monitor in the consumer unit reads current without cutting into wiring. This is an electrician's job in most places, and it has the advantage of being able to meter individual circuits rather than only the total.
What is actually drawing it
Once you know the total, the next step is finding the contributors. The usual suspects, roughly in order of how often they turn out to matter:
- Network equipment. Router, mesh nodes, switches, and often an old device nobody remembers. Frequently 30–60 watts combined, and mostly non-negotiable.
- Media stacks. Television, soundbar, games console, set-top box. Consoles in particular can idle high, and standby settings are frequently not what you assumed.
- Anything with a display or a clock. Microwaves, ovens, coffee machines, printers.
- Old appliances. A twenty-year-old freezer can draw several times what a modern one does.
- Chargers left plugged in. Individually trivial, collectively real across a household of devices.
- Immersion heaters and towel rails on a circuit somebody enabled and forgot.
- Underfloor heating in one room running its own thermostat.
- Extract fans running continuously.
The cheapest way to find them is one metering smart plug rotated around the house, a day at a time, logging idle draw. After a fortnight you will have a ranked list, and it is nearly always two or three items accounting for most of the total.
What to do about it
Be realistic: some of your standing load is the price of a functioning house. The router stays on. The fridge stays on. The alarm stays on.
What is genuinely addressable falls into three groups.
Switch it off properly
Media stacks, printers, coffee machines and desk setups can go on a metering plug that cuts power when the household is asleep or out. This is the classic standby-cutoff automation, and the caveat is to exclude anything that needs to update overnight or that behaves badly when power is removed abruptly.
Change a setting
Frequently the fix is free. Games consoles have low-power standby modes that are not always the default. Televisions have quick-start options that keep them warm. Printers have sleep timers. Ten minutes in settings menus can remove a surprising number of watts.
Replace it
The one case where replacement genuinely pays on standing load alone is an old fridge or freezer. If a twenty-year-old appliance is drawing markedly more than a modern equivalent, the difference compounds over 8,760 hours a year and the payback can be a few years rather than a decade.
The seasonal trap
One caution about when you measure. A baseline taken in July is not the same as a baseline taken in January, and the difference is not only heating.
In winter, anything with a thermostat works harder: fridges and freezers in a cold garage actually work less, but a boiler’s pump and controls run more, trace heating on outside pipes may be active, and dehumidifiers run longer. In summer, air conditioning and pool pumps appear. If you measure once, measure in the season that matters most to you, and be aware that a figure from the opposite season will mislead.
The better approach, if you have continuous monitoring, is to look at the overnight minimum each month for a year. That single number, tracked over time, is the clearest indicator of whether your house has quietly acquired a new permanent load — and it catches things like a failed fridge thermostat or an immersion heater left enabled months before they show up on a bill.
What this is worth, honestly
We are not going to invent a figure, because it depends entirely on your baseline, your tariff and what you find. What we can say is the shape of it: if you reduce a 300-watt standing load to 180 watts, you have removed roughly 1,050 kilowatt-hours a year. Multiply by your own unit rate to see what that is worth to you, and compare it with the cost of one metering plug and an afternoon.
The reason we start here rather than with solar panels or a battery is sequencing. Reducing consumption is cheaper than generating or storing electricity, and every watt you remove from a continuous load is a watt you never have to generate, store or buy. It is also the step that tells you what size everything else needs to be.
A weekend and a fortnight
- Saturday: establish your baseline, by dongle if you have a meter port or by reading the meter overnight if you do not.
- Sunday: walk the house and list everything permanently powered. You will find something you had forgotten.
- Fortnight: rotate one metering plug, a day per device, and record idle draw.
- Then: fix the free ones by changing settings, put the media stack on a scheduled cutoff, and price replacement only for the genuinely old cold appliances.
- Re-measure the baseline and see what you actually achieved. This step is the one people skip, and it is the one that tells you whether any of it worked.
None of this is exciting. It is, reliably, the cheapest kilowatt-hour you will ever save.