Every power adapter is rated in volts and amps but that doesn’t really convey how much electricity it really uses. Is that monitor really 1.5A? Is it a terrible power suck to leave your phone charger in all of the time? We all know AC systems are the biggest hogs but where else are the impacts? Some findings so far:

• Radiator space heaters are power hungry – maybe not surprising but easy to forget about because they’re silent
• Leaving big speaker systems on (but not playing music) is still significant use but leaving in a phone charger is negligible
• A single nice new LCD TV is better than old twin big LCD monitors for power
• A lot of makerspace tools require surprisingly little power and you can run an entire lab of little business machines on a single 15A circuit

See the spreadsheet of observations over the years