Margen
You have, right now, fifteen or twenty switched-off appliances in your home that are still drawing power. Not one of them is allowed past half a watt: a European law has forbidden it since 2013. With that ceiling in place, your whole switched-off house costs you thirty-two euros a year, and three quarters of that figure goes to four appliances that are exempt.
The ceiling was set by Commission Regulation 1275/2008 and is kept in place by Regulation 2023/826, which replaced it on 9 May 2025 and is the text that now governs the design of household and office equipment. It says this: in off mode or standby, 0.50 watts maximum, and 0.80 watts if the appliance keeps a little display lit with the time or the status. There is one exception, and it is the one that takes the money: appliances that stay inside the network so they can wake themselves up. The high-availability ones —a router, which has to stay reachable at all times— may go up to 8.00 watts, and the rest up to 2.00.
Put in euros, an appliance that is merely on standby cannot cost you more than 88 cents a year, or more than 1.40 if it has a clock. The ones that stay inside the network fall outside that sum: the router gets to fourteen. It is a small limit and it is the law. And it is coming down: in May 2027 off mode drops to 0.30 watts and routers to 7.00.
Where that figure comes from: a year has 8,760 hours, so half a permanent watt is 4.38 kilowatt-hours, and at twenty cents a kilowatt-hour, 88 cents. The same rule covers the rest of the house, and it is the only one needed here: one permanent watt costs 1.75 euros a year.
Here is how the switched-off house looks, giving every appliance its legal ceiling, which is the worst possible case:
1. Router and fibre ONT, 8.00 W: €14.02 a year. 2. Television set-top box, 2.00 W: €3.50. 3. Smart speaker, 2.00 W: €3.50. 4. Wi-Fi printer, 2.00 W: €3.50. 5. Microwave with a clock, 0.80 W: €1.40. 6. Oven with a clock, 0.80 W: €1.40. 7. Television on standby, 0.50 W: €0.88. 8. Washing machine with a panel, 0.50 W: €0.88. 9. Three chargers plugged in with nothing attached, 1.50 W: €2.63.
That adds up to 18.10 watts, 158.6 kilowatt-hours and €31.71 a year. The first four, the only ones the law lets reach 2.00 and 8.00 watts, take €24.52 of that €31.71.
And the chargers, which are what half the world unplugs every night, come to €2.63 a year between the three of them. With the legal ceiling applied, which is generous: a modern charger with no phone on the other end draws considerably less than half a watt. A whole year of unplugging them every night gives you back, at most, €2.63.
That leaves the other half of the bill, the appliances that are not waiting but running. Three examples, same rule:
- A 300-watt dehumidifier, six hours a day: 657 kilowatt-hours a year, 131 euros. - A twenty-year-old fridge in the garage, one of those rated at 350 kilowatt-hours a year: 70 euros for keeping four beers and a tub of ice cream out there. - A 1,500-watt electric water heater heating two hours a day: 1,095 kilowatt-hours, 219 euros.
Any one of the three eats in a month what every charger in the house spends in a year.
The instruction, which you do once in your life:
1. Find the energy labels of the big appliances, in the paperwork drawer or on the manufacturer's website under the model number. They have the annual consumption in kilowatt-hours printed on them. Multiply it by 0.20 and you have the euros. 2. Write down whatever is on more than four hours a day: fridge, freezer, router, water heater, electric heating, dehumidifier, pool pump if there is one, fish tank if there is one. Watts times hours a day times 365, divided by a thousand, times 0.20. 3. Sort that list from biggest to smallest and act on the top two. Only on the top two. 4. Do nothing at all to the chargers. If some night you are going to get up and unplug something out of habit, unplug the router: that is fourteen euros a year and, as a bonus, you sleep without notifications arriving.