13A socket monitor recommendations please

Could this be a viable alternative? I already have a Tapo device (security camera) so the software may already be installed.

Cheers

Dave R

I have one. Works fine, seems to measure down to small currents like the 3W or so standby usage on my 43" Sony smart TV + Humax HD FOX T2. I haven't used it on higher power devices.

This shows an interesting anomaly. I go to bed at about quarter past midnight but the usage recorded by the Tapo 110 shows the Sony TV dropping from about 70W to 16W and then at about 4AM (and at almost identical time every day) it suddenly drops to 3W and stays there with occasional blips up to 16W until it comes out of standby again.

This may be a red herring, but 4 am is when the Humax prepares to receive an update. Are they talking to each other?

The 3W may be the eco mode user setting which puts the TV into a deeper standby. The time may be a default 4 hours. The TV may periodically wake during standby to regularly update an over the air EPG, taking 16W.

It's reporting to the overlords compressed screenshots of your viewing habits apparently....

Not during standby, the camera inbuilt to the TV is always sending back the viewing habits of the people on the couch/chair to make sure that the ratings are accurate.

Not sure. It's a 15 YO model, and I think I have disabled 'auto OTA downloads' anyway. It isn't connected to the web

Watching tractor videos (John Deere etc, not the Neil Parish videos), and construction videos (the B1M).

Oh, and ITV news and not BBC 'news'

Fair enough. I think in fact the OTA time is more like 4:30 anyway. Keep looking!

I have a contractor who is really into his conspiracy theories, he gets all his news from TikTok, and he keeps talking about how our TV sets are all spying on us. When I point out that my TV is neither 'smart', in the modern abuse of the word, and has no way of receiving any information apart from signals from the remote control, he then says that he only means modern sets. Whatever.

It's true. Modern smart TVs are tracking what you watch (typically via the audio) and gathering that data in order to sell it to advertisers:

That is the best approach. If you have to buy a smart TV (and it's pretty hard not to nowadays), don't connect it to the internet. Plug in some other box into the HDMI port that you have carefully chosen to not track you:

'The' HDMI port? Surely most TV's have several nowadays.

'... most TVs ...'.

I've not consented to any of it on my LG TV - at least I think that's what I've done. I use the 'LG Channels' a fair bit.

At best it seems to have confused the advertising content - most of the time it's just a splash screen with lift music during breaks. The very few ads that break through tend to be for the pay channels, and nothing like what I watch.

At worst it is, as you say, quietly monitoring everything.

A while back my Samsung TV asked me if it could report back my viewing habits. I said no, and then unplugged the network cable. Digging into the settings, there are well over a hundred "interested" parties that Samsung has allowed to peek at what I'm doing. Apart from disabling their cookies, I don't think there is any easy way (firewall rule ?) of stopping that. Most of those parties I've never heard of, and judging by their names, I suspect aren't British companies, so are of no relevance anyway.

Which is another thing (apologies for the thread drift). Even when I was watching/listening to broadcast (rather than streamed) programmes, the amount of network traffic the TV was generating was astounding. I looked into it, and every few seconds it was sending out a message to everything on my network advertising its presence. There doesn't seem to be a way of turning that off. As I (currently) have no desire to link my phone to the TV, it isn't a "service" I have any use for.

Adrian

I am in the process of turning all my TV s into HDMI screens driven by rasberry Pis.

The only thing I need them (as TVS) for is HDTV which doesn't always work well on computer dingles

A Pi 5 is fully capable of driving full HD these days and really good stereo music from wherever your stuff is stored and the rest is all browser.

I would say all tvs since around 2002

Interesting. That is probably some MS or Apple protocol ...the problem is that DHCP tells the set what IP to have but tells no one else where it is.

The answer is to make it a dumb TV and use something else to drive it.

Apart from BBC news, I only watch recorded stuff so I can skip through the ads.

I could wish there was less time wasting program/i player promotion on our user funded broadcaster:-(

Only hundreds of "interested parties", I had closer to a thousand!

When first setting up the Samsumng TV there is a "do you want ......" option but it is completely unexplained what this option does and possibly like 99.9% of new users I just pressed next or OK just to get on with the initial setup of the TV.

I later found that I had all these "interested parties" either taking data and/or were allowed to send me advertising. On this initial menu page it seemed that I could only delete or disable each entry one at a time.

Soon afterwards I found in menu/settings/terms and privacy two options I consent to viewing information services on this device and I consent to interest based advertisement where all could be turned off in one go