Anyone have a similar device with this pattern? I can’t figure out what this could be. It comes on for a few seconds every 5 mins nonstop. See screenshots for details.
I’ve seen patterns like that from some kinds of power supplies / chargers and from hot water heaters that keep a small amount of water permanently hot.
What’s the magnitude? It kind of looks like a Keurig during “keep hot” mode…but I’d have guessed more than a “few seconds”.
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I added a picture to the imgur album that shows it is 215W. I have a nespresso but its only on in the morning when im making coffee.
My water heater is already found. Maybe its a charger for dewalt batteries or some other device…
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Are you pretty sure it doesn’t have a “keep hot” feature, running always in the background? Many of these units do, something the manufacturers aren’t always clear about. You could try something like a Kill-a-Watt (about $20 from Amazon) to check for such parasitic power drains. I did that a few years back and was amazed at how much power is wasted by devices supposedly “turned off”.
I think the comment “hot water heaters that keep a small amount of water permanently hot” probably referred to devices like coffee makers, some of which keep the water hot full time, even when supposedly “off”, not your hot water heater (a very different pattern).
This might be a defrost cycle for a refrigerator, the power seems about right although the run time seems short.
With 5 secs spikes / every 5 min, we’re talking about 4W of power delivery on average. I think someone has seen a laptop charger that looked like this.
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It took me a while to discover all my devices that draw parasitic power, even when “off”. Modern TV’s are notorious, so are things like office equipment when seemingly powered down…my laser printer took a long time to find. My TIVO also was hard to track down because it draws variable amounts of power, depending on what it’s doing.
All good ideas, thanks for the input. I will do some investigating.
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