How to save on home energy costs – How to save $50-$100 every year using a Smart Plug

How do you save on home energy costs? We’ve talked about smart plugs before, and how you can use them around the house. But what are the actual benefits to your energy use and wallet? By purchasing smart plugs, you can save between $50 and $100 on your electricity bill every here.

How to save on home energy costs using a smart plug

The best feature is obviously the ability to save money. When you invest in smart plugs, add them to all your high power usage areas. Plugs in your living room and home office are a couple that might use a lot of electricity.

For our setup, we use the most power in our basement work area where we have all our devices plugged in. This includes a laptop, a desktop monitor, and a printer. By adding a smart plug to the outlet where everything’s plugged in, we can stop the phantom power phenomenon. If you’re interested in picking up a smart plug but don’t know where to start, check out which we think are the best!

What is phantom power?

If you’re not exactly sure what phantom power is, it’s basically the energy that you use when your devices aren’t turned on. Even if something is turned on, being plugged in means it’s still drawing power that you have to pay for. An example might be your television; when it’s off but plugged in, it’s still using phantom power.

Stop this from happening by unplugging your appliances. It’s a bit of a hassle to do that all the time. This is where smart plugs come in.

How does a smart plug save on home energy costs?

Smart plugs might seem like a novelty device, but they can save you money in the long run. By plugging these into your outlet and then plugging in your device, you’re given the ability to remotely turn your appliances on and off.

The real benefit of smart plugs is the ability to give them a mind of their own. Apple called it an automation. This means you can do things like set the smart plug to turn off the moment you leave your home. When you’re not at home, you shouldn’t leave your appliances plugged into be consuming power and wasting money. You can have another automation turn everything back on when you arrive home.

It’s possible to also use an automation to turn everything off when you’re asleep, saving power when you don’t need anything plugged it. In our home, we’ve got an automation set for several smart plugs to switch off around 12:30 a.m. and turn back on at 5:30 a.m.

Try using it for places you have a television, speakers, amps, gaming consoles, Blu-Ray players, and whatever other devices you might not need plugged in all the time.

The smart plug pays for itself very quickly

Let’s take a look at how much money you can save with smart plugs. For a large living room with a television, gaming console, DVR, and an audio system, the money you spend on wasted energy is about $45. For an office with two monitors, printer, lights, a laptop and a wireless modem, the waste is about $75. We’ve taken these estimates from here and here.

Smart plugs can cost between $40 and $50 a year so you’ll recover the cost of the plug after only a year or two. There’s very few gadgets that you can buy that will have a direct return on investment, so it’s neat to be able to calculate that on smart plugs. Have you ever thought about how much money you’ll be making off your next smartphone purchase? It’s definitely in the red.

Check out some of our other articles on smart home devices. If you thought this was helpful and you’re thinking about purchasing a smart plug, check out or links to buy them for yourself. Leave any questions or comments for us in the comment section below!