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Standby Group

The Standby Group is a special group designed to monitor the total power consumption of devices when they are in standby mode or turned off. This helps you track the "vampire power" or "phantom load" in your home - the electricity consumed by devices even when they're not actively being used.

How it works

The standby group automatically collects and sums up:

  1. The standby power of all devices that have a standby_power configured and are currently in an OFF state
  2. The self-usage power of smart switches and other devices that consume power for their own operation

After configuration, you'll end up with two sensors:

  • sensor.all_standby_power - Shows the total standby power consumption in watts
  • sensor.all_standby_energy - Tracks the accumulated energy consumption in kWh

Configuration

The standby group is created by default when you set up the Powercalc integration. No additional configuration is needed to start using it.

If you want to disable the standby group, you can do so in the global configuration:

Using YAML configuration

powercalc:
  create_standby_group: false

Using the GUI

  1. Go to Settings -> Devices & Services
  2. Find and click on Powercalc
  3. Click on Configure for the Global Configuration entry
  4. Uncheck the "Create standby group" option
  5. Click Submit

Adding devices to the standby group

Devices are automatically included in the standby group when:

  1. They have a standby_power value configured in their Powercalc configuration
  2. They are smart switches or other devices with self-usage profiles

Example configuration with standby power

powercalc:
  entities:
    - entity_id: switch.my_device
      standby_power: 0.5  # 0.5W of standby power when the device is OFF
      # other configuration...

Use cases

The standby group is useful for:

  • Identifying how much power your devices consume when not in use
  • Finding energy-saving opportunities by identifying devices with high standby power
  • Monitoring the baseline power consumption of your home
  • Calculating the cost of standby power over time