I tested a $15 smart switch and found a coffee maker wasting $1,500 a year in electricity

A SwitchBot Relay 1PM, bought for about $15, revealed that a La Spaziale S5 coffee machine was likely burning through roughly 8 kWh in standby—enough to total more than $1,500 a year in wasted electricity for UK business tariffs. The culprit wasn’t a “smart” s

When he finally pulled the coffee machine a few inches from the wall. it wasn’t for a gadget test—it was because the numbers kept feeling wrong. The machine was a La Spaziale S5, a heavy hitter that can draw up to about 4,500 W at full load. But the real worry was what it was doing while it sat there, supposedly resting, for roughly 16 hours a day.

The setup was simple enough on paper: a SwitchBot Relay 1PM switch—palm-sized. about 1.6 x 1.4 x 0.6 inches and weighing 0.9 oz—wiring into the coffee machine’s power so the relay could handle the on-off control through its app and connected systems. The relay itself is designed for AC power from 100 V to 240 V at 50 and 60 Hz. handling up to 16 A. and it also supports DC power from 24 V to 30 V. It’s meant to be installed behind a switch or socket faceplate inside an enclosure. because the screws are live at mains voltage.

This isn’t a device you should leave dangling in the open. The relay isn’t water-resistant, and the instructions urge care—if you have any doubt, the work shouldn’t be DIY’d without an electrician. The physical safety warnings weren’t the part that stuck with him. The power bill was.

The SwitchBot Relay 1PM is built for automation: it works with Alexa. Siri. and Hey Google. and it can integrate with IFTTT and SmartThings. It also supports Matter. In the SwitchBot app. you can turn things on or off. schedule when they should switch. and customize what happens after a shutdown—whether the relay returns to on. off. or whatever state it last had. It also includes missed-touch prevention. which asks you to confirm before operating the switch. plus an NFC feature that lets a SwitchBot tag pair with the relay so you can control it by touching your phone.

Where the relay earned its keep was power monitoring. It provides a live reading and historical data, letting you track what a connected device actually consumes. Over just a few days, that monitoring turned suspicion into a figure that wouldn’t leave him alone.

He number-crunched the data and found the coffee machine’s standby usage was about 8 kWh during the downtime—around 0.5 kW every hour. It didn’t make sense to him at first, so he checked and retested it, getting the same figure.

UK electricity prices—and business tariffs—are higher than those in the US, and that made the arithmetic brutal: the standby consumption translated to over $1,500 a year being wasted.

That number wasn’t a passing annoyance. It became a reason to look closer at the coffee machine itself. These machines aren’t his usual area. but the leak story had a specific shape: there was a small water leak in the low-pressure side of the machine. It wasn’t producing a puddle—because the unit stays warm and the water evaporated quickly—but it meant the water tank was continuously being filled with cold water.

The result was simple and punishing. The machine was always working.

After fixing the leak, the standby power dropped to under 0.25 kW per hour during standby—a massive change even if the machine was never fully turned off.

And then the question shifted from “Was the switch right?” to “Was it worth it?” At only $15. the relay paid for itself in roughly a year or so. especially if you consider that people rarely stop at one smart switch. The app’s scheduling, power monitoring, and automation features are there whether you buy in for convenience or for control. But in this test. the real impact came from turning a boring standby assumption into something measurable—and fixing a problem that had been quietly costing money.

It also left him with a warning that doesn’t sound like a tech demo. If you start automating and tracking power use, the next move often isn’t another gadget—it’s the realization that something in the background has been running too hard for too long.

SwitchBot Relay 1PM smart switch home automation power monitoring coffee machine standby power La Spaziale S5 electricity cost UK tariffs IFTTT SmartThings Matter Alexa Siri Hey Google NFC pairing