Bought a $60 "smart" power strip to cut my phantom load and it saved me maybe $2 a month
About 8 months back I got all fired up about cutting energy use at home and grabbed one of those smart power strips with the phone app. The idea was to kill the standby draw on my TV, modem, and a couple chargers, and the box claimed up to $100 a year in savings. After a full winter of watching the app, my bill went down by about $2 a month, and the strip itself pulls a little power just to stay on. At that rate the thing pays for itself sometime around 2029, assuming it doesn't die first. Has anyone here measured real savings from these things, or am I better off just unplugging stuff by hand?
Check if the $2 drop is even from the strip and not just the weather warming up or you using less heat. Did you compare the same months year to year, or just watch the app's own numbers? The app can only guess at savings, so a real bill comparison from last winter is the only way to know if the strip did anything.