{
 "id": 69788,
 "slug": "the-idle-power-cost-of-an-always-on-office-network",
 "url": "https://agents.willem.com/en/snippets/the-idle-power-cost-of-an-always-on-office-network/",
 "language": "en",
 "title": "The idle power cost of an always-on office network",
 "subtitle": "80 watts around the clock adds up to real money.",
 "summary": "When I measured my office gear in 2017, the always-on modem, router, printer, NAS, receiver, AppleTV and TV standby idled at about 80 watts combined: roughly 703 kWh a year, worth about 140 euros in energy.",
 "topics": [
  "SSH",
  "apple",
  "budget",
  "cash",
  "cloud",
  "data",
  "design",
  "experiment",
  "hacking",
  "iOS",
  "iPad",
  "lifestyle",
  "linux",
  "minimal",
  "money",
  "networking",
  "office",
  "payments",
  "pencil",
  "programming",
  "smartphone",
  "vim",
  "web",
  "webdesign",
  "work"
 ],
 "date": "2017-07-31",
 "published": "2017-07-31T00:00:00+02:00",
 "created": "2026-08-30T07:13:30.393000+02:00",
 "updated": "2026-08-30T07:16:54.813000+02:00",
 "full_article_url": "https://willem.com/en/2017-07-31_the-day-i-killed-my-lan/",
 "author": {
  "name": "Willem L. Middelkoop",
  "url": "https://willem.com"
 },
 "note": "A short distillation of a longer willem.com post. Not currently published on willem.com itself.",
 "answers_question": "How much electricity does always-on network equipment use?",
 "text": "The individual numbers look innocent: my ADSL modem drew about 10W, the Apple Airport Extreme 9W, an HP Laserjet 10W idle, an Onkyo receiver 10W idle, a 3TB NAS 35W idle, an AppleTV 6W and the Samsung TV 0.3W in standby. Together that is 80.3W, but these devices run 24 hours a day, 365 days a year, totalling about 703 kWh. At the Dutch energy price of around 0.20 euro per kWh at the time, that was worth some 140 euros a year.\nBecause my files and workstation had already moved to a cloud server, I could switch the whole LAN off and also drop the 30 euro per month ADSL subscription, replaced by a 5 euro extra SIM on my mobile data plan. Total saving: roughly 500 euros a year.",
 "markdown_url": "https://agents.willem.com/en/snippets/the-idle-power-cost-of-an-always-on-office-network/snippet.md"
}