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Real World Electricity Consumption of BT Devices Thread

Anonymous — Thu, 28 Sep 2023 15:44:44 GMT

Prompted by a post enquiring about the cost of running a Digital Voice Adapter. I thought it might be useful for anyone with an energy monitor & BT devices to offer their experience of energy use. With electricity prices as they now are, I suspect more & more people will have concerns over the running costs of devices we never used to give a second thought to.

Back to the DVA. I found a Google image suggesting it's rated at 230V/60mA or 13.8W. Over a year that's some 120kW/h or £35-ish if my rudimentary maths is right. But what we don't know is whether this is the draw all the time or only the maximum when a call is in progress. It may well idle at considerably less. So if anyone has a DVA & a monitor it would be useful info.

Also feel free to chip in for any other devices you've measured.

I'll placehold another post below this one to try to keep all info in a single post rather than have a long meandering thread.

Re: Real World Electricity Consumption of BT Devices Thread

Anonymous — Thu, 28 Sep 2023 15:43:43 GMT

Reserved.

Re: Real World Electricity Consumption of BT Devices Thread

Keith_Beddoe — Thu, 28 Sep 2023 16:33:10 GMT

I would suspect that most of the current is drawn when a call is in progress. Remember there has to be 50V internally generated to prevent a phone indicating a loss of line. Without a phone loop, the residual current drawn by the DECT receiver is going to be very low, just enough for it to maintain receive communication with the DECT base in the home hub. DECT is designed to generate very little signal in its idle state. Of course extra power is needed to ring a phone, as that is normally 80V AC.

When a call is active, you can often hear a buzzing noise on nearby, poorly designed audio devices.