---
title: "The idle power cost of an always-on office network"
language: en
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"]
full_article_url: https://willem.com/en/2017-07-31_the-day-i-killed-my-lan/
---
# The idle power cost of an always-on office network

*80 watts around the clock adds up to real money.*

> 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.

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.
Because 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.