Your smart home might be silently adding hundreds of dollars to your annual electric bill—and you'd never know it because the waste happens while you sleep, spread across dozens of devices that never truly turn off. In this episode, Chelsea Miller shares findings from three years of monitoring every outlet in her fully local smart home setup, revealing exactly where the power goes. This is essential listening for anyone running energy management systems who wants real numbers instead of marketing promises, with a practical checklist for identifying high-consumption devices and phantom loads draining your wallet.

• Baseline infrastructure adds up fast: a typical network closet with a hub, router, mesh nodes, and NAS can draw 48 watts continuously—that's 420 kilowatt-hours annually (roughly $60) before a single smart bulb turns on.
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