Ask a lighting designer whether smart controls are worth the energy cost, and you'll get a lot of hand-waving. Ask me, and you'll get a direct answer: the smart features are nearly free to run. The power supply is where your money disappears.

For context: I coordinate emergency lighting orders for a distributor that supplies LED drivers and power supplies to commercial integrators, electrical engineers, and contractors. When a hotel's lighting system fails the night before a grand opening, I'm the one figuring out how to get 60 drivers on a truck by 6am. In the four years I've done this, we've processed more than 200 rush orders—and last quarter alone, 47 of them, with a 95% on-time delivery rate.

That position gives me an unusual vantage point. I see the post-mortems. I see what was specified, what was substituted, and what actually broke or underperformed. After enough of these, patterns become impossible to ignore.

The Smart Feature Panic Is Overblown—Quantifiably

When a client asks "does smart lighting use more electricity?" they're usually imagining the system as a vampire: always awake, always sipping. Fair assumption, honestly. A smart light with Wi-Fi, a controller, and a sensor does draw standby power. But let's put that number in perspective.

A typical smart lighting node—controller and communication module included—draws 0.2 to 0.5 watts in standby. For a commercial space with 100 smart fixtures, that's 50W of continuous draw at the absolute high end. Over a year, that's roughly 438 kWh. At the national average rate, that's a little over $60.

$60. For an entire building's lighting system.

That's not a vampire. That's a mosquito.

The real waste is sitting further upstream.

What the March 2024 Fit-Out Taught Us

Specific example. In March 2024, I got a call from a retail fit-out contractor on a Wednesday afternoon. Their flagship store's lighting system was drawing 35% more current than the load calculations predicted. The electrician on site was convinced the smart lighting modules were faulty. Someone had told them smart control is a power hog.

They wanted to rip out the smart modules and install manual dimmers. Costly, and in my opinion, the wrong diagnosis.

I asked one question: what drivers were actually on that shelf?

Turned out procurement had swapped the specified drivers for off-brand substitutes. The specs looked equivalent on paper. The printed wattage ratings matched. The numbers said the substitute drivers were fine—my gut said test them anyway.

We sent two technicians with a power analyzer to the site. Within an hour, we had our answer. The substitute drivers were running at 68% efficiency under real load, wasting 32% of incoming energy as heat. The smart system was functioning flawlessly. The "smart lighting is a vampire" panic was completely misplaced.

We swapped in 24V Mean Well supplies from the LRS series—specifically the LRS-150-24, which we had in stock—and current draw dropped to expected levels within minutes. The opening wasn't delayed one hour.

That client was asking the wrong question. The smart system wasn't the energy hog. The power conversion was.

The 12V vs. 24V Decision Everyone Gets Wrong

Here's where real experience diverges from common advice. Most of what I read about LED efficiency focuses on chip efficacy and lumens per watt. Useful stuff. But in practice, the biggest efficiency gains I've seen in rush orders come from a much more boring decision: the system voltage.

12V LED strips are everywhere. They dominate the consumer market, and you'll find them specified for under-cabinet task lights, shelf lighting, and way more commercial installations than you'd expect. The low voltage feels safer. The components are cheap. Online forums default to it.

For a desk lamp or a short LED strip inside a floor lamp? 12V is completely fine. The cable run is short, and the losses are negligible. We stock the Mean Well power supply 12V options—like the LPC series—precisely for those smaller, constant-current loads.

But the moment your LED strip run passes about 3 to 4 meters, or you're distributing LED modules across a wider space, 12V stops being "safe" and starts being wastefully inefficient.

Here's the physics in plain terms. Power equals current times voltage. To deliver the same wattage at 12V, you push roughly twice the current that a 24V system would. And since resistive loss in wiring scales with current squared, doubling the current quadruples the wiring loss. On a 5-meter strip run, that difference is more than measurable—it's significant for dimming performance and overall heat.

In our own measurements on an identical 5-meter LED strip, the 12V setup wasted about 4.8% of input energy in wiring. The 24V setup lost roughly 1.2%. Long runs widen that gap fast.

Now, honesty moment: 24V strips are somewhat less common in retail, and for certain compact fixtures, 12V remains the right call because of component compatibility. This is not an "always 24V" argument.

But for anything longer than 4 meters, choosing between a Mean Well 24V power supply and a Mean Well power supply 12V is often the difference between a system that runs cool and a system that bleeds energy into cables. I recommend 24V for those cases without a lot of hesitation.

Okay, the Skeptics Have a Point—But Not About the Smart Features

Let me address the counter-argument directly, because there are cases where a smart lighting system really does draw noticeable idle power. And in every single one I've investigated, the culprit is the driver, not the smart module.

Poor-quality drivers waste a shocking amount of power when they're sitting idle—connected to a smart controller with no load. A well-designed driver idles at 0.3 to 0.5W. Cheap, poorly engineered units can draw 3 watts or more continuously. That doesn't sound like much until you multiply it by 100 drivers in a commercial building. That's 250 watts creeping past your meter even with the lights off. Over 2,000 kWh a year. Real money.

So the honest framing: the smart layer rarely causes the problem. The quality of the power supply absolutely matters at scale.

And sure, Mean Well is what I reach for by default. Their LRS and HDR series idle draw sits at the efficient end of the range, and the 3-in-1 dimming (resistor, PWM, voltage) makes them flexible across projects. But I'm not going to pretend it's the only option. If your project needs DALI, you should buy a proper DALI driver, and that may or may not be Mean Well. Blind brand loyalty is just as dangerous as blind price hunting.

What I'd Actually Change First

If you're designing a lighting system—LED strip for a cafe, accent lighting for a retail store, or a floor lamp with integrated dimming—here's what I'd focus on, based on the patterns I've seen in hundreds of urgent orders:

  • Specify 24V if your run is longer than 4 meters. The wiring losses and heat buildup at 12V aren't worth the convenience.
  • Check idle draw, not just rated output. Especially for always-connected smart systems, a driver that idles at 0.3W instead of 3W pays for itself.
  • Aim for 75–90% of rated load. A 150W supply powering a 30W LED strip isn't "safety headroom"—it's a low-efficiency system running outside its sweet spot.
  • If you're unsure, ask someone who handles these products daily. It's way less expensive than the emergency replacement fee you'll pay later.

The Bottom Line

So—does smart lighting use more electricity?

Not enough to matter. The meaningful waste in modern LED systems comes from voltage mismatch, wiring losses, and poor driver efficiency. The smart features are just the most visible part of the system, so they get blamed.

When a client calls me at 4pm needing a 48-hour turnaround, the underlying problem is almost always that someone treated the power supply as an afterthought. Give the supply side the same attention you give the fixtures—choose the right voltage, the right driver, the right load point—and you'll stop worrying about a phantom standby draw that was never the real problem in the first place.