House uses 40W / h for "essential" appliances

I was away during the week and measured my background power usage:
6am Monday 16/7/2012 - ESB meter 31126.40
9pm Friday    20/7/2012 - ESB meter 31130.72
So  4320 W in (4 x 24) + (21 - 6) hours => 4320 / 111 W/h => 39 W/h

I just had the telephone, router, two IP cameras and a hall lamp (the later just on for 2 hours a day).

So I started measuring the power consumption of various items to see if this adds up:

Appliance                                                     Actual                                           Rated
----------                                                      ------                                          -------

bedside lamp                                                    4W (warming up?)                      11W
hall lamp                                                           7W                                              9W
white laptot (Asus EeePC 4G Surf)                 23W (charges internal battery)      22W
black laptop (Samsung NC10)                        43W (charges internal battery)      40W
cordless phone (Philips CD 255)                       0W (I guess fully charged)            3W
IP camera (Edimax IC-3010Wg)                       7W (wired mode not Wifi)         12W
Eircom Wifi router (Zyxel P-660HW-T1v3)    18W                                              8W (huh?)
 

So I'd estimate (4 x 2 x 7) + (111 x (7 + 7 + 18)  W => 65 + (111 x 32) => 3617W (so 703W or 16% out)

My power measurements are not too exact (> 10%) so this seems about right.

The upshot is I need to plan on providing 40W+ per hour from my off-grid system to just supply "essential" appliances ! That's 960 W per day. Or a unit just for a few bits of kit!

So it would be good to make some low energy smart switches (timer or IR sensor based) to turn these on and off on demand. I should then be able to reduce this usage by a factor of 20 for the days I'm away.