Victoria's Blog

Chromecast Ate My Internet Data Allowance!

In January I bought a Chromecast so that friends and family could cast videos onto the main living room TV. It’s a handy little device and when idle it displays lovely background images of nature, space and various other things. I don’t know why, but I never considered where it gets those lovely background screen saver images from…

As I previously have mentioned, I have a capped Internet data allowance of 64GB per month. This month (11th March to 11th April) we ran out of data two days early for the first time this year. It’s incredibly painful having to wait a couple of days until the Internet comes back on 🙁 Yes I know – I need to get out more!

I logged into my home router to see who’d gobbled the most data this month and give them a bit of a shouting at only to discover that the top user for the month was the Chromecast, beating even me to top data user!!

Chromecast was using 700MB+ per day IDLE!

Luckily I managed to find a web page explaining how to tame the Chromecast and restrict it’s data usage by giving it access to a Google photo album with 1px images.

I found that I needed more than two of these images and that each had to be a slightly different colour or Google photos was clever enough to not upload duplicates. The backgrounds can be seen in my shared album here: https://photos.app.goo.gl/GPf1UFMRN5Rw1Xaq2. I also found that you have to make sure that when you disable the other sources of pictures that you untick all the items within the category before marking the category as “off”.

The effect of using the new 1px album images was instant and hopefully I won’t end up running out of data two days early next month 🙂

(Chromecast limited at 9pm Thursday 12th April)