Vampire devices: do they really have any bite?
Your TV, your laptop, your phone charger. Even the poor kettle has found itself on lists of household "energy vampires", quietly draining electricity while you sleep.
And every so often, another frightening headline appears telling us how much money all these plugged-in appliances are costing us.
But being plugged in isn't proof of a crime and we suspect some of these claims might be a little overblown.
So, in the spirit of Halloween, we're going vampire hunting. We're testing ordinary devices around the house to find out what they actually use when they're not being used, what that costs, and whether the reputation is deserved.
This is an ongoing experiment by Nicki, one of our geeky energy writers, who will probably do most of the testing, and Laura, our SEO expert and all-round excellent human. We'll publish what we've measured, add new suspects as we test them, and update the verdicts when the evidence changes. No garlic needed.
On with the tests!
🔴 Unplug them: Devices that drain noticeable power on standby. Switching these off at the wall will actually save you money.
🟡 Your call: Draws a tiny trickle (costing less than a couple of quid a year). Unplug them if you want, but don't stress over them. And don't bother with a smart plug (more on that later)
🟢 Leave them: Claims of vampirism are a complete myth. These devices physically cannot draw standby power, or if they do, they use so little it costs mere pennies a year. Save yourself the faff and leave them plugged in.
Device and model: PlayStation 5 Disc Edition (CFI-1216A)
Mode tested: Rest mode, with USB charging and WiFi enabled. I didn't actually charge anything in the USB slots, though.
Test duration: 24 hours
Average continuous power draw: ~3.3 W
Energy used in 24 hours: 0.08 kWh
Estimated annual cost: £7.69
Verdict: 🔴
We'll let you into a secret: we, your lovely authors, bickered over this one. Laura, a big gamer who plays a lot and likes her updates to be ready when she boots up, thinks it's worth every penny and we should have made it yellow.
Nicki, who used to be a big gamer until a small human entered her life four years ago, is now lucky if she turns her PS5 on every six months. It's definitely not worth the money for her. Plus, we needed a red one. Sorry Lau, you can win next time.
This just shows that all this stuff is pretty subjective. If keeping a device on standby is worth it for your convenience and you don't mind the spend, why not? But if it's genuinely just running up the bill and you're gaining nothing, this is a good one to switch off.
Date tested 30 October 2026
Device and model: Toshiba (MM-EM20P).
Mode tested: Plugged in, clock displayed, nothing cooking.
Test duration: Instant check
Continuous power draw: 0.6 W
Energy used in 24 hours: 0.014 kWh
Estimated annual cost: £1.38
Verdict: 🟡
If it's not too much faff to unplug it every time you use it, you'd save yourself more than a quid a year, but what can you get for a quid these days? Not very much, that's what. We wouldn't bother.
Date tested 30 October 2026
Device and model: Ninja Foodi Dual Zone Air Fryer
Mode tested: Plugged in, screen off
Test duration: Instant check
Continuous power draw: 0.25 W
Energy used in 24 hours: 0.006 kWh
Estimated annual cost: 58p
Verdict: 🟡
Yes, technically unplugging the air fryer every time you use it would save you a tiny bit of cash. But is it worth it? We think probably not. You can't even buy a can of Diet Coke with 58p these days.
Date tested 30 October 2026
Device: Breville kettle
Mode tested: Plugged in, but not boiling
Test duration: Instant check
Continuous power draw: 0.0 W
Energy used in 24 hours: 0 kWh
Annual cost: £0
Verdict: 🟢
When we get to phone chargers, we say that an 0W reading doesn't necessarily mean no power is being used: it might just mean that Nicki's device wasn't sensitive enough. But in this case, we can trust the figures. When (standard) kettles are off, the electrical circuit is broken. They can't draw any power. No matter what your mum says when she insists on switching them off at the wall. (The exception is if you have a fancy, high-tech kettle, with lights that stay on all the time or something, but we're pretty sure these are rare).
Date tested 30 October 2026
Device: Dualit toaster
Test duration: Instant check
Mode tested: Plugged in, but lever up
Continuous power draw: 0.0 W
Energy used in 24 hours: 0 kWh
Annual cost: £0
Verdict: 🟢
We found a few examples of toasters appearing on vampire device round-ups but unless you have some kind of high-tech, all-mod-cons toaster with wifi, swish automated levers or a touch screen, it's nonsense. As we understand it, the pop-up lever physically breaks the circuit, so zero power can flow.
Date tested 30 October 2026
Device and model Ugreen 100 W GaN phone charger
Mode tested: Plugged in at the wall, nothing connected to the charger
Test duration: Instant check
Continuous power draw: 0.0 W observed, max 0.09 W
Energy used in 24 hours: Max 0.002 kWh
Estimated annual cost: Less than 21p
Notes: This is one where a reading of 0.0 W on an energy meter should be taken with a pinch of salt because it could just be that the meter isn't sensitive enough. But that doesn't mean the test is useless!
In this case, Nicki's charger probably is using a tiny bit of power because modern power bricks draw a microscopic trickle to keep their internal transformers ready to deliver charge.
Nicki's meter goes down to 0.1 W. So, even if we imagine the charger is continuously using 0.09 W, that would amount to just 0.79 kWh of electricity a year, costing an absolute max of 21p (but probably much less).
Verdict: 🟢
We definitely wouldn't bother unplugging our phone chargers every night to save 21p a year, but it's up to you.
Date tested 30 October 2026
What actually is a vampire device?
A vampire device is the nickname for an appliance that continues to use electricity when it appears to be switched off or isn't performing its main job. It's often called standby power or phantom load.
However, not all vampire devices are made equal, and there are some important differences:
🦇 Off, but plugged in. Like a toaster or phone charger
🦇 On standby: Such as TVs or microwaves
🦇 Networked standby: a games console, printer or smart device might still be connected to wifi, checking for updates or ready to wake up.
So, is standby electricity a real problem?
Sort of. Standby electricity use is real, and it can add up across a household. Energy Saving Trust estimates that switching appliances off standby could save around £45 a year in Great Britain.
That's an estimate for a household, though. It doesn't mean your TV is costing £45, your phone charger is costing another £45 and the microwave is plotting financial ruin from the kitchen counter.
The age of an appliance, how it's designed and the settings you've chosen all matter. In fact, the UK government opened a consultation in October 2026 on updating the standards for power consumption in standby, off and networked-standby modes.
Should you buy smart plugs to defeat vampire devices?
If you are thinking of buying a £15 smart plug to automatically kill the power to your microwave or air fryer, stop!
Smart plugs are actually vampire devices themselves. To stay connected to your Wi-Fi so you can control them via an app, a typical smart plug often draws 1-2 W of continuous power. That costs about £3.50 a year just to run the plug.
If you use it to turn off a microwave that only costs £1.38 a year on standby, you are actually increasing your energy bill, and you will never pay back the cost of the plug.
Even for a true vampire device like a games console, the net savings are so small that it would take over three and a half years to break even on the hardware cost. Save your money, and just use the switch on the wall!
The investigation continues
We're publishing this for Halloween, but we're not wrapping it up on 31 October. We'll keep testing devices, adding results and updating the article as the evidence comes in.
Because if there's one thing scarier than a vampire lurking behind the television, it's a confidently repeated claim nobody thought to measure.
Do you have any burning questions about vampire devices? Got suggestions about what we should test next? Let us know. It should be on Nicki's LinkedIn first thing on Halloween and anyone can post a reply.
First things first
This isn't a laboratory certification exercise. It's a transparent set of measurements taken in a real home. Which home? We're glad you asked. It's the Folkestone home of Nicki, one of the people writing this article, and it's full of geeky smart devices so there should be plenty to test.
The financial bit
For all our calculations, we used the average Flexible Octopus unit rate as of October 2026, which sits at 26.32p/kWh. Prices will be slightly different on different tariffs and in different areas, and they will change over time.
How Nicki tested her devices
She used a plug-in electricity monitor to measure what individual appliances draw from the socket. To do this at home you need a monitor capable of detecting very small amounts of power. If you're interested, Nicki used an Energenie ENER007 electricity meter.
For every test, she recorded the device's make and model, the mode it was in (if relevant) how long she measured it for and how much energy it drew.
Where the consumption changes over time, she measured energy over a longer period rather than rely on one reading of watts. In the future, we plan to test different settings on the same device to see if they make a difference!
One important point
A monitor displaying 0.0 W doesn't guarantee a device is using absolutely zero power, it simply means the power draw is too small for the meter to detect. The energy monitor Nicki used has a minimum detection limit of 0.1 W. We've flagged this where relevant.
However, even if a device was secretly drawing 0.09 W 24/7, just sneaking under the radar, it's not a useless test. It tells us that if you left the device we're testing plugged in all year, at current Flexible Octopus rates, it would cost a maximum of just 21p. Not exactly a scary vampire!
Published on
Laura Iancu
SEO for Clean Energy
Nicki Slater-Arnold
Energy Writer