Slashdot Mirror
The True Cost of Standby Power
Luther19 writes, "How much do all of our computers and electronic devices sitting in standby mode cost us? The author of the article concludes that he could save $24.44 per year by switching out wasteful power supplies. The article also touches on a global initiative to cut down on standby power, called '1-Watt': 'The idea has been promoted by the IEA, which first developed an international 1-Watt plan back in 1999. Countries like Australia and Korea have signed on officially, while countries like the US require 1-Watt in government procurement, which will have ripple effects throughout the economy. The goal of the program is to have standby power usage fall below 1W in all products by 2010.'" It's estimated that in industrialized countries, devices on standby consume on average 4% of the power used.
Nothing to see here.
But I don't think people are going to switch out their PSU mid hardware life.
Push these improvements to the manufacturers and make the next generation of devices last longer per watt.
Make them better when they are both on and off.
Also folks, switch off your keyboard indicator lights to save power.
liqbase
Then it will be using 0 watts. Much less than using standby.
This is a serious problem and we need to change, and change now. I propose that instead of "Access Standby" mode we IMMEDIATELY redesign ALL electronic items to have a "Mode Execute Ready" state which uses less power.
I have recently switched to a steam powered laptop. Nothing like coal and water.
-----------
James Watt XXIII
Save 5% a year on electricty costs by buying this new 1-Watt certified televistion that costs 10% more to make!
I'm going to get one of these 1 watt supplies so I don't have to pay the big zorkmids to keep the filaments in my Victrola warm for that instant-on effect.
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
The way we engineers do it is by pareto analysis - you try to cut out of the largest portion of your power consumption. I'd like to see what lines up as the numbers one two and three consumers of electricity, and how that compares to the cited 4%, and how much was saved by going to standby mode as it stands today. I'm guessing that there are better places to focus the effort, but perhaps that's just my own bias.
Quiz: True or False -- On a scale of 1 to 10, what is your middle name?
I'm not sure the effort and materials costs associated with replacing a power supply are worth $24 per year...
I caught the Mountain Wumpus! He gave me his treasure chest ($100) to let him go free again.
You can buy a low cost wattmeter that you plug your equipment into and simply read out the power consumption. I've found that a lot of devices in standby take almost no power. Other devices aren't so frugal. I'd like to see some real statistics on this and something like the energystar ratings you see on refrigerators put on computers.
I remember reading (maybe years ago) a Slashdot story where the comments mostly discussed wall worts and their collective drain on a given power grid. It could have been this story, or this story, or even this story.
Whichever story it was, it changed the way I used my electronic devices that went into standby mode when I turned them off.
Why cut all the devices down to 1W draw, when I should be able to drop ALL my devices to 1W *total*. Put a 1W IR sensor on my power strip, and then I can turn the strip on and off from a remote! For modern programmable remotes, it's just one more line in my power on macro, and instead of 6 or 8+W (1W for each device, when you consider TV, VCR, DVD, Receiver and my 2 powered tower speakers), you just have the 1W from the "sleeping" power strip.
It'd get even better if I could teach my Tivo to turn on/off my cable box!
-Moracq
"Huh?"
Yeah nice one. Now you're just spewing greenhouse gasses into the atmosphere.
I googled for "coal powered laptop", just out of benign curiosity though, and I found a laptop powered by a jet engine. No coal powered laptops though, shenanigans!
Why apply this only to standby mode? Why not apply this to devices that are completely powered down as well? I've noticed a significant reduction in power consumption when I've unplugged appliances and other electrical devices (most notably my PC) when they're not in use. Is it that difficult to implement a hard switch within the device? Understandably, we wouldn't want this for devices that are operated via remote.
Everything I say is a lie. Except that... and that... and that, and that, and that, and that... and that.
Postings so far have criticized the cost of conversion to save the under-$25/year figure.
But there's another cost:
How much does it cost in lost productivity, over a year, while people wait for their monitors and computer to "warm up" from power-save mode every time they've left their desks or done something OFF the computer for too long?
And for recreational machines: In lost lifetime? How much is YOUR life worth to you?
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
The 4% figure stated for standby power usage will surely decrease as people purchase systems that use more power while running (i.e. multi-core, high-end GPU, etc.).
Is this good news or bad?
Are the five seconds to bring your computer out of hibernate really that critical? Hibernate takes 0W if you switch off your PSU when you walk away.
I agree with reducing energy use/expenditures of our electronic devices... but that needs to be done when they're on.
Standby greatly reduces the draw, and that's it's point. It's not supposed to use no power, just less. If people are concerned by the power they're using, they should turn unecessary their devices off. It really doesn't need to be any more complicated than that.
It's somewhere between cold and hypothermia (metric) in here, so I don't feel too bad about leaving the old space heater althlon on. In fact since I moved to this benighted part of the world it hasn't been any other way.
This is possible the only advantage of living in England. That and the beer.
As for people with their AC on... switch it off! You can aclimatise to heat easily as long as you never go near air conditioned space. It normally takes me a week to get back into the swing of things but I'm perfectly comfortable in 90+ weather - the dehumidifier is way more important than the cooling, if you need any mechanical aids at all. Then at least you won't be paying twice for your power (heating and cooling the excess heat).
Think of the Children; Sleep with your Sister
Some always-on devices are just plain stupid. Like computers: remember when computer PSUs had a physical switch that cut the power to the computer? when they replaced that with a soft power button that connected to the motherboard, they replaced a perfectly working system with one that didn't bring much at all to anybody, save for people who need to remote-boot through a network card and for people who are too dumb to stop the OS before the machine, and created the hateful power-button-that-doesn't-work-when-the-OS-crashes syndrome. Not to mention the extra power consumption...
"A door is what a dog is perpetually on the wrong side of" - Ogden Nash
The amount saved is so minimal. You can make it sound large when you multiply it by the entire population, but if you compare that to the GDP of the nation, the amount saved is even more minimal!
Plus, who will feed the starving families of the power companies when we all start using $24 less of power each year!
I think this coupled with a small, cheap solar install on every rooftop could significantly cut power usage. With advances like this this, its doable - not to power your house, but to help distribute generation capacity and smooth out load peaks. Of course, solar cell manufacture consumes a lot of energy and can create industrial waste issues, but the point is to get the power generation somewhere dirty and concentrated, rather than smogging up everything.
I want to delete my account but Slashdot doesn't allow it.
I just finished a comprehensive audit of all the electricity drawing devices in my house:
o ld_energ.html
:-)
http://digitalcrusader.ca/archives/2006/10/househ
I learned that my Stereo system consumes 22W when on "standby" and only about 35W when in use - what a total waste! So I put it on a power bar. My older TV is 0W standby, and all the newer Wall Warts that I have seem to be OK as well - 4 of them together only rate 1W. Your milege may vary
augment your senses: http://sensebridge.net/
Could someone tell me why you would even use stand by power? I just don't see the benefit of saving 1-2 seconds when modern consoles take longer than that just loading the main menus and hence defeat the entire point..
I mean why is it so difficult to just turn it on?
I like muppets.
From the article: Over the course of a device's lifetime, the cost of all that standby power can actually exceed the cost of having the device on.
So, using full power costs less than by using standby? I suppose I can cool down the kitchen by leaving the fridge door open, too? Maybe I should leave the hot water running to cut down on my power bill?
When our name is on the back of your car, we're behind you all the way!
I got one of these to play with last year:
http://www.thinkgeek.com/gadgets/electronic/7657/
While hooking it up to every little device I could find, I found that battery chargers, such as those for your drill or cell phone, are using electricity while their respective devices are not even connected to them. Granted, it's not much power, but with 5 or 6 of them plugged in, and no devices even attached to them.. thats wasteful. So.. unplug 'em if you aren't using them.
Don't Tread on Me
...but those of the environment. Think how much less we'd pollute if we could close down 4 out of every 100 power plants.
-- Language is a virus from outer space.
You know, for about half of the year, I'm paying for heat in one form or another. This "wasted energy" helps to heat my house during that part of the year. Additionally, I pay less for electricity during nights and weekends - it's cheaper than propane to heat with electricity during those hours. So, an "inefficient" electrical device, actually _saves_ me money if I'm paying to heat the house.
A watt is one kilogram times a meter squared divided by a second cubed. The second cubed is easy to visualize, but then someone mixed it with stinky French metric units.
You're right, few people are going to bother with replacing power supplies because it's just not worth it economically to replace them.
But, the point is that if the industry had spent just a few dollars (maybe pennies) more in designing the devive, they'd be saving you money and it's be worth the extra costs. Right now most consumers have no idea the amount of money it costs them for these inefficient electronics, so there's no incentive for manufacturers to bother.
AccountKiller
Um, it would be nice if they could encourage 1 Watt as a usage goal while the device is on as well. I can understand things like irons, dishwashers, dryers, refrigators, ovens, garabe disposals, vacuum cleaners, and heating/air conditioning taking up a big amount of energy while in use. I have no clue how much it costs to run my dishwasher each cycle or say over a month's time.
I'd love for the government to work toward's most devices using 1 watt or less. Those walkaround phones, TVs, ceiling fans are a few things that I would like it if they used 1 watt or less during operation. Heck, how much electricity do each of the new next gen. game systems use during play and during standby?
Most old videogame consoles use less than 1 watt on standby, but this seems to be going away The PS2 already used 2 watts on standby, and the XBox 360 is following suit. We don't have firm data on the Wii and the PS3, but given the numbers of the PS2 and the Wii Connect24 feature, I'd be surprised if either of the two go back to the 1W barrier
That's the sound of a joke going over your head...
Put an on/off switch on every mains socket. Very common in the UK.
Ever since the passing of the AT power supply, computers have only had what is for the purposes of this article a standby modes. The soft-power switch needs juice to work, after all. (A few power supplies still have a hard power switch in addition to the soft-power modes.)
You want to fight the war on power consumption? Incandescent light bulbs. In regards to energy consumption, they are perhaps the most inefficient piece of technology today; and they are everywhere.
What do I have to do to get a sig around here?! www.bearscanfly.org
Our development bring the consuption up. I don't like the whole idea going out of my way, just to save a few watts here and there.
Develop useful products, which are more energy friendly, and switch to the most environment-friendly energy today (nuclear), until even more environment-friendly energy is economically viable.
But do not tell me, that i have to waste my time waiting for my system to boot, sit at home in the dark, or otherwise endure great uncomfort, to save energy.
The technology is part of life. How would you feel, if i'd tell you to wait 3 minutes every time you decided to breathe in?
It's not that using up energy is bad. It's just that we are provided with BAD ENERGY.
there is no issue with my network
http://hardware.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=06/01/ 23/0549203/ 1733225
http://games.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=06/07/21
/* oops I accidentally made a comment, sorry */
A cheaper 80+ 250W PSU would cost a little under $40 before taxes. (I think 80+ is the new buzzword for 80% or more efficient PSUs). Older PSUs, say 2+ years, were typically in the 70% efficiency range. There are a bunch of articles at http://silentpcreview.com/ and other sites about this sort of thing.
I ran the numbers a while ago for one of the PC's around here. The last time I ran the calculations, it costs around $50/year to power that PC for about 6 hours per day. So the break even for me is somewhere around 5-8 years! So while the power grid would get a bit of a break, financially, I wouldn't.
I still might get a new PSU, but that's more because I have serious doubts about the quality of the power coming out of the current one (a suspicious # of hard drive deaths...) but that's a separate issue.
For new purchases, definitely go for the more efficient PSUs... as far as "upgarding" goes... it's borderline at best, at least for me.
Given my general observation at work places that most people don't even bother switch to stand-by power and just leave their computers on, I think encouraging people to put the computers is a good start, even if not perfect. Ideally it would be nice to be able to have computers hibernate, but then if you want to work from home, then there is no solution to wake them up. The wake-on-Lan solutions that I have seen only work on computers in stand-by.
At one of the places where I worked I implemented a web page which you could access from the VPN, and type in your PC name and it would wake up your office computer, if in stand-by.
Jumpstart the tartan drive.
It normally takes me a week to get back into the swing of things but I'm perfectly comfortable in 90+ weather - the dehumidifier is way more important than the cooling, if you need any mechanical aids at all.
Unless you are using a disposable dessicant (like Silica), a dehumidifier IS an air-conditioner, and requires no less energy to operate. It is just one that puts the heat back into the room instead of outside. An A/C an be used as a quite effective dehumidifier if you slow the blower speed. This increases the dehumidification but does have the side effect of decreasing the cooling efficiency. All variable-speed A/C systems usually have DIP switches you can throw to adjust blower speed.
You might find that an A/C system adjusted for dehumidification could keep your house at a comfortable heat and humidity level while also making it habitable by wimps.
Carrier (I don't know if they exist in the U.K.) makes a thermostat/A/C system called the "Infinity" that will run your blower unit at the precise correct speed to meet your temperature AND humidity control requirements for top comfort. (It can also run a humidifier in the winter time if low humidity is a problem.)
SirWired
Would it be possible to design a power strip for wall warts that could sense whether an external device was actually drawing on each of them at the time, and cut back the input power when it's not?
How about a media center power strip with a remote control - just a simple on and off - with the option to train it to accept the on and off signals from other remotes?
Or have a media center power strip which can be trained to recognize the power draw of one key device when it's in on rather than standby mode, where the key device is then left in its normal standby/on mode but plugged into a special socket in the strip, and the strip then cuts or restores power to all the other devices according to whether the key device is turned on?
If you start manufacturing that last one, please send me one!
"with their freedom lost all virtue lose" - Milton
"Standby power" is what you have when you can use the remote control to turn on the TV, DVD player, etc. It is powered up enough to be able to respond to the remote, i.e. it is standing by for your commands. It need not be a remote, however. A printer with an electronic power button (like a little HP inkjet, for example) is in standby mode, as opposed to the gargantuan EPSON 132-column industrial dot matrix printers that have what looks like a circuit breaker to turn them on and off. A touch-lamp would be using standby power, while a bulb on a mechanical pull-chain switch would not.
This is only very loosely related to your idea of laptop-style standby mode.
There's also a convenience cost. Is it worth $2 a month to you so your entertainment devices can rapidly turn on?
"...the hateful power-button-that-doesn't-work-when-the-OS-crashes syndrome."
Do people really not know that they just need to hold the switch for forced power off?
Hmm, also install a wind generator in your chair, so that whenever you fart, the power can be fed back into the grid...
Excuse me, but please get off my Pennisetum Clandestinum, eh!
It's estimated that in industrialized countries, devices on standby consume on average 4% of the power used. [Citation Needed]
Improving the efficiency of a PC with a low-loss power supply has knock-on benefits. Where I work, they have to cool the place even in the wintertime (in Boise, Idaho!). Imaging if they could reduce the waste heat enough to stop having to cool the place even when it's below zero outside. The knock-on benefits would be year-round, of course.
Another poster pointed out that incandescent bulbs are a horrible waste. Gummint could help by switching out traffic light, street lighting, etc. to more efficient LED power.
And this subject came up in a discussion of data-center power, heating and cooling. The typical data center has servers, each with its own power supply. Heck, in the next cube over from me (not a data center), there's about 10 servers, each with its own supply. And just over the partition are two racks, each with about 10 blade servers in them, each with their own PS. Take the PS out of the blade, put it into the bottom of the rack and distribute the power. Huge electricity and cooling savings.
We could be doing better, and we should.
Best regards.
I know Georgia Tech went on a campaign a few years back to replace as many incandescent bulbs as possible.
As part of it they replaced all of the 300 watt bulbs in the Van Leer build (old EE building) with 20 watt fluorescent lamps. Each lab probably had 10-15 twenty of these power hogs. After the switch our labs were freezing cold! All that extra cooling wasn't needed any more.
Over the course of a year it saves the institute over 2 million dollars. the first million was in direct power reduction, the second million was due to reduction in cooling cost.
Why is it that so many devices that have no need to draw power when turned off have no aty to turn them completely off? My paper shredder has an optical on/off switch tht draws power all the time. My coffee maker draws power all the when it is turned off. Many items draw power just because it has a remote remote control or a clock, why does my microwave oven need to draw power all the time just to power a clock that is not used for operation? (it does not have an auto turn-on based on time of day). I have a stereo that I don't use the remote to turn it on and off, why can't I turn it completely off?
...you could cancel your WoW subscription. Heck, you'd even make more money doing that.
Right, because look how well that worked for gasoline...
Ok, you're trying to be sarcastic. Ask GM and Ford about this. They're both on the ropes because they tooled up for SUVs and then the price of gas went ballistic. Sales of hybrid and other higher efficiency cars have spiked and they're not going to come back down. Toyota is about to pass GM as the world's biggest, and they sell SMALL CARS. They have a sellers market. I know because I was at the dealer two days ago. The salesman was polite, but uninterested in talking. All his Camry's were gone.
So the point is valid; jack the price of electricity and we have new incentives to save power.
Best regards.
But, the point is that if the industry had spent just a few dollars (maybe pennies) more in designing the devive, they'd be saving you money and it's be worth the extra costs.
Yes by all means. Let's get rid of those stupid little LEDs on the front of all my new A/V components telling me "I'm turned off right now, but if I were turned on this light would be off". Sure the power bill effects are marginal at best, but it is the annoyance factor of all those things with lights on at night. There is no good reason the A/V center should look like Shuttle Mission Control when everything is off fer cryin out loud.
My Suburban burns less gasoline than your Prius.
Give me a SWITCH GOD DAMMIT I am the COMMANDER of the O N O F F CONSOLE!
ZERO POWER!
ZERO POWER!
ZERO POWER!
I'd go on a Vegan diet but the delivery time from Vega is too long. --brownkitty
1. Those of us who don't unplug devices in between uses, such as coffee makers and toasters, put a heavier load on the line than when nothing is plugged in (in general, but not always).
2. Keeping our old Win PCs as Linux boxen may have been cool, but when you think of the load for the internal fans, power supplies - usually we buy heavy duty overpowered ones - and other parts, you may want to consider recycling the oldest ones so that China can get the lead pollution (except in the EU).
3. One reason we have a gas crisis is when they made cars, Americans (and Canadians) tended to buy a much more powerful car that was more efficient, so instead of a lower horsepower car getting 60 to 100 mpg, we get more efficient more powerful higher horsepower cars that get the same mileage as before - this psychology is frequently at work on many of us, in terms of computers. I have way more USB ports than I probably need.
4. Most of the drain is really server farms used for commercial reasons, and the cooling power for them - If we moved to more flash media and related technology we might make more of an impact in this area, just as realizing more RAM is usually more efficient than more disk space.
-- Tigger warning: This post may contain tiggers! --
The biofuels industry made real progress while prices were high. Probably will continue to do so next month as well, since I very much doubt prices are going to stay as low as they currently are.
Personally I'd like to see a tax on incandescent lightbulbs. Replacing just one of those in a high-use socket will save more power annually than your devices use on standby.
Someone had to do it.
Disk drive suck power at a terrific rate. Reducing the power consumption of mass storage is one of the opportunities in saving electricity. Between reducing CPU power consumption, replacement of CRTs with LED displays, and reducing rotating mass of disk drives, there's a lot that can be done to improve the power profile of a PC. When you've reduced the PCs requirements for power, you can downsize the power supply to add even more power savings.
Best regards.
Well, switching out an existing power supply wouldn't make sense, but having them built efficiently in the first place would.
For more impressive power saviong, look at the power usage of your UPS's. I always knew that a UPS used 5% to 10% more power than it output at full load, but I was surprised to learn that the 225 kW UPS's installed on a job actually cost about 20% of full load rating when running at very low loads, giving it an efficiency of less than 50% at those loads.
I'm not so conceited as to think that tons of people actually read my blog, but my article on Oct. 12 says:
The Power Is Too Much For Me
Last night I was standing in my living room looking at my stereo amplifier. The front end showed no signs of life, as it was off. I began to consider exactly what that meant.
The thing is, it wasn't really "off". I could pick up the remote control and turn it "on" without touching the unit itself. Clearly there is an active circuit that waits for transmissions from the remote control. If it were truly "off" the unit wouldn't hear my command. So even when it is off, it consumes electricity in small amounts.
The same goes for my television. In fact, any device that can be turned on remotely never really turns off unless the power is physically disconnected. My microwave looks like it's off (it has no clock on it), but when I press the keypad it becomes clear that the keypad circuit is hardwired to be "on" all the time. My video recorder runs continuously as well.
Now it may seem like a very tiny amount of energy is involved here, but there are literally billions of consumer electronics devices all over the world that perpetually use tiny amounts of electricity when not in use. Other devices have LED's that run when the device is on to tell you it is, in fact, on. My computer has a "power" light on it, for instance, and so do millions of others.
Imagine how much electricity is completely, utterly wasted by pointless excesses of luxury like these. Do I really need a light on the front of my computer? That energy has to come from somewhere, and if it comes from fossil fuels like coal, or from nuclear plants, it is non-renewable. My stereo wastes energy 24 hours a day so that I don't have to walk ten feet to turn it on, a procedure which might take 5 seconds.
Really there's no reason for such waste to occur. I'm going to put my stereo on a power bar, and turn the whole thing off by force.
The headline says "It's estimated that in industrialized countries, devices on standby consume on average 4% of the power used." This seemed way too high to be believed. So I checked and in reality what TFA says is "Across Europe, cutting standy power to 1-Watt would give countries a four percent start toward the Kyoto targets".
That's four percent towards the Kyoto targets which are of course nowhere near zero. So, parasitic power is (claimed by TFA to be) 0.04 * ((current Euro power consumption) - (Kyoto target for Euro power consumption)). Not quite as dramatic.
Make <X> more expensive! It certainly worked with cigarettes. [/sarcasm]
If you can read this sig, you're too close.
Lest anybody thinks I actually believe I've been short-changed an authors credit, I know it's a coincidence.
Some fluorescent bulbs tend to be heavy on the eyes, mind you, the light is more to the blue side and it is rather unpleasant to be in a room lit by such.
Is here at the Financial Times.
Wasteful television standby settings and the energy efficiency of computers and water heaters are to be targeted in a new legislative drive aimed at slicing 100bn a year from the European Union's energy bill, in a move that could impose Europe's green agenda on the world. Stringent new European Commission energy efficiency targets for items such as electrical appliances and cars could set new global standards, since all imports into the European market would have to comply.
Some previous EU deadlines have resulted in some pretty dismal performances (the Lisbon agreement springs to mind), but the EU's very high standards for energy efficiency and recycling have been adhered to across the continent with admirable results. Not to mention the fact that EU enforced limits on car pollution (as one example) have led to high efficiency cars in Europe and across the globe, as manufacturers are forced to comply with EU levels to gain access to the EU market.
The proposed regulations - including extensions of existing rules - would impose European energy efficiency standards on any company worldwide seeking access to the EU's 480m consumers, including US manufacturers. European standards and norms in the car sector and mobile telephony have already become accepted in many countries worldwide, to the annoyance of Washington, which believes the EU sets too many rules.
If there is one criticism that is levelled at the EU a lot, is that it sets too many rules. But the high standards they have raised in efficiency for cars and electronics (think about those EU energy labels on all fridges, freezers and so on, they've come a long way from D's and E's a decade ago, how much energy did that initiative save?), so it's A-OK by me.
Yeah, you can probably safe $25 by turning your computer off instead of the 10W standby (or sleep) mode but I think I safe more money by not turning off my computer.
How so: I earn $25/hour while freelancing. If I have to wait for my computer to boot up it uses more energy, time and it will go through my hard disk faster. It will also have to initialize all hardware which otherwise could have stayed off. Saying I have to turn my computer on once a day, it will take up on average 300 minutes that I lose waiting. That is easily 5 hours. That costs me $125 per year per computer. If I use more than 1 computer (quite frequently) or shut- and reboot my server it costs more minutes depending on the services (large MySQL database and Apache and SSL stuff for developing) it takes me 10-20 hours to wait for all services to come up, then I haven't downloaded all updates and cron jobs that would otherwise run at night, so I lose time in splitting bandwidth and processing on my server.
Then I haven't talked about the strain it puts (cold warm, initializing, heavy usage during startup) on critical components like hard disks especially in winter when it literally near-freezes in-house or during summer when you can sit in your underwear in the computer room. The fans keep the internal temperature pretty stable right throughout the year and I can also slightly profit in winter by the heat it puts out (less warming up with conventional heating systems) although that might be not so influential on the overal temperature.
Then I haven't talked about lost profits and time spent repairing power supply's and hard disks that crashed due to off-on-cycles. I have always had a computer in the house for the last 5 years while other house members like to put theirs out. My self-built server has been running happily along (with UPS) all that time while I had several hard disks crash in the others mostly during boot.
Custom electronics and digital signage for your business: www.evcircuits.com
I'd be interested in getting some office servers to work a bit like most modern photo copiers.
Accessing them sets a timer, and after that has expired the machine spins the disks down and maybe goes into some sort of half sleep mode (i.e. still listening to the network). That way, it's still available when required (barring spin up time) but will cut down on power use during weekends, evenings etc. The startup time could be lessened too by maybe waking it up at 8:30am by timer, and a nightly backup could force standby when it has finished.
BTW, I wonder how much those stupid, pointless neon lights in power strips use on an annual basis..
= Ch =
Insert
A related article in the british press quotes an average cost of £48 per year (= ~ $90) for a TV standby power usage. That works out to about 80 watts. I know for a fact that my TV only uses 2 watts in standby mode because it says so in the manual and I've measured it. It appears to me that this whole thing is a scam by the electronics industry to sell replacement "low power" electronic goods to everyone. Honestly, there's no point going to the effort of unplugging the TV for the amount you're going to save. Beside, the energy used will only turn into heat, so the heating in your house will need to work 0.0001% harder and you'll save the $0.75 back over a year anyway.
Like tinyurl, but one letter less! http://qurl.co.uk/
Yeah nice one. Now you're just spewing greenhouse gasses into the atmosphere.
Unless you and/or your employer signed up for wind generated power, your laptop runs on electricity probably generated by one of these 3 things:
1) A nuclear power plant,
2) a coal fired plant that generates steam that then runs turbines to generate electricity,
3) another power plant with coal replaced by natural gas.
Or, you live in the Pacific Northwest - British Columbia, Washington, Idaho, Montana, Oregon - and get 90 percent of your power from hydroelectricity, and you can buy green power (wind or solar) to replace the last 10 percent.
Or, you live in Ontario, Quebec, Vermont and other places that buy cheap hydropower from Quebec.
-- Tigger warning: This post may contain tiggers! --
Then you don't use any gas, and the world is saved! Of course, your food spoils before it can get to you, but you didn't waste any petroleum!
0 watts is better than >0 watts, but only if EVERYTHING ELSE IS EQUAL.
But it's not. If you turn off your computer instead of leaving it on, that affects many things other than just how much power you are using while the computer is off. It means you have a boot squence where you use a *LOT* of power. And where you do a LOT of reading/writing to/from disk. And you have to sit around and wait for your computer to boot. And then reopen everything you closed when you shut-down.
Saving $24/year in power is not worth spending $25/year on failed hard drives. Or on time lost turning your computer on and off again. Or on the power you use booting the thing back up.
paintball
So? Some incandescent bulbs tend to look horribly yellow and very dim.
That's why you get an appropriate bulb, instead of condemning the whole technology because of a few bad examples.
I think that's more than worth it for instant-on capabilities on many devices.
I go out of my way to turn off APM on every computer, and I LIKE the fact that my ancient (by today's standards) CRT television takes only 10 seconds to turn on instead of 3 minutes. I remember my parents' first "big" (27" or 25" Zenith console) color television would take 2-3 minutes if the "standby feature" was turned off (it was labeled "vacation" on old TV models).
The Christian Right is Neither (Christian nor right). See: Matthew 23, Matthew 25, Ezekiel 16:48-50
I have this $60 dollar surround sound receiver wich I bought from walmart(it was onsale for like 1 month ) . All devices should work this way . If I turn the power off by the remote it goes into standby. If I turn the power off from the unit itself it shuts off completely. All devices should do that. This way it gives u a choice.
...put a true "off switch" on the device. All TVs in Europe have (or at least used to have) a real off-switch that cut power consumption to zero. It was simplicity itself to turn on the TV when you wanted to start watching it pick up the remote control which was kept next to the TV and when you were done put the remote back and turn of the TV.
This not only cut standby power to zero for most of the day but also meant I never lost the remote down the back of the sofa! In addition it pretty much emliminated any fire risk from faulty electronics. When I moved to the US I was amazed that there was no such button on TVs there (and I've found it is the same in Canada as well).
Since I was unwilling to spend a minute squeezing my hand round the back of the entertainment centre to plug/unplug the TV and there were no switched on the plug sockets I ended up leaving the TV in standby. The only plus being that the incessant adverts on every channel meant I ended up almost cutting out TV watching when I was living in the US which, as was recently pointed out to me, somewhat ironic given the "TV culture" of the US!
And then reopen everything you closed when you shut-down.
It's not 1998 anymore. Almost all contemporary computers have a hibernate feature. I'm more concerned with re-opening all the defunct putty sessions and other network connections.
The OLPC should suspend to RAM in the milliwatt range. The video chip goes into standby, the CPU sleeps, the display backlight turns off. There's a NAND flash controller, it's doing nothing. RAM CAS refresh is virtually nothing (mW range).
In a real machine, everything can sleep the same. Network isn't being responded to, the NIC can sleep aside from listening for a WOL (it can wake when it gets signal, and use a passive buffer?). Video is OFF. CPU is disabled (HLT). Hard disk drive spins down and turns off. Sound card is off. CD drive is off. The fact that it eats power is due to bad design, especially with a PSU eating 5-10 watts to supply a board with 15mW of power to CAS refresh RAM even if it DOES shut its components down efficiently.
As a personal prediction (I am not affiliated with OLPC), I think a ton of nice stuff will come out of the OLPC project. Performance enhancements, power management while ON, power reduction in sleep/standby mode, better LCD displays, cheaper parts (see Wikipedia on LCD for cheaper, better LCD displays as spawned by the OLPC project), and so on. They may have cheap, low-power parts; but they still need to save power and money over even that and they're doing a damn good job.
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An electric space heater and a computer that uses the same watt-hours of electricity will heat the room by the same amount (provided you have no windows, of course). Physics doesn't care *how* you convert the energy from electrical to heat, and using it to do fun things (like surfing the net, watching a DVD, and heating a little pizza in a toaster oven) loses nothing.
You got that right. If they just made TVs, VCRs and stereos with non-volatile RAM and a battery powered clock, we could just shut them all off with a power strip. It's no big deal to flip the switch on the power strip when I get home.
"It's not unused. What the Save-a-watt fanatics don't want you to consider is that without standby power, you couldn't turn on your TV with a wireless remote. Just imagine if everyone had to get up to turn on the TV "
Use some intelligence..
Use a switched power outlet from AV SRS receiver (Onkyo SR-5XX) to power up/down other A/V components.
I.E. One remote controls power to all the other AV components, except for TV.
P.S.. An Onkyo SR-501 AV SRS receiver draws less than a watt when placed in standby mode.
The author of that article could blow 10 times that much money a year worrying about what brand of "fair-trade" coffee he should drink. What an idiot!
Look it up.
So, let's see. First, we had computers that were on all the time.
So our first investment was to have them go to standby automatically. And we got huge savings from that.
Now, *maybe* we can eke out some more savings. But it's a hard technical problem because, quite simply, standby is both cost effective and highly convenient.
The next investment shouldn't be in better power supplies for desktops. Rather, operating systems and applications should be designed so that if you pull the plug and then power on again, the system is right where you left it. Any solution short of that is not good enough.
The best compromise we probably have is "hibernate," but I find that pretty slow on all the machines I've used. People aren't patient, and they have good reasons not to be so if you're taking this seriously as an engineering problem and not as an ideological issue, you have to take that into account.
Or... you live in a place with cheap 1970's shag carpet and you generate electricity by dragging your socked feet all day.
-- I ignore anonymous replies to my comments and postings.
Make electricity more expensive, then people will make a huge effort save power...
The price of electricity (in most areas, barring some horribly-managed municipal utility) is a happy medium between what people are willing to pay and what it costs to provide power. (This is "supply and demand.").
What it costs the power company to provide x units of power is directly related to the cost of the coal, natural gas, etc. that it takes to power the power plant. The fuel prices are again happy mediums between what the utilities are willing to pay and what it costs to mine/refine/extract the fuel.
Given this relationship, there is no need whatsoever to make electricity "more expensive." If the power grid is inadequate, utilities are going to raise rates - they need money to upgrade it, and this will also discourage excess consumption. If it's a "peak oil" problem, electricity prices will go up as fuel becomes scarce and people will again use proportionately less.
In the capitalism you tell us to "take advantage of", electricity already has been made more expensive for us. Thank your friendly neighborhood market economy for that one. ^.^
DATABASE WOW WOW
Guess I'm going to put that magnet back on the wall behind the meter.
Don't forget the dimmer switches. Those are ugly.
"0 watts is better than >0 watts, but only if EVERYTHING ELSE IS EQUAL."
Exactly. That $24 per year is $16 during the heating season, $2 during the cooling season, and $6 during the "windows are open but don't need AC" season. The $16 would have been spent on heat anyway (since we have electric heat) so that leaves $8 spent that we didn't need to. Maybe $9 with the extra AC needed during the one month we use AC.
Obviously, people living further south may have a different result, but this is non-visible on my worry scale.
That's it? That's all he'll save is $2.00 a month? That's news? WTF!?!? He could cut out his $10/day Starbucks habit and save more energy *AND* money...not to mention my patience.
I used to switch off my TV every day, and the internal PSU went dead in three months from the purchase date. Maybe the TV was already bad, maybe this is correlated to the electrical sparks I saw every time I pressed the "on" switch on the powerstrip, but I do not know.
So, forget about standby power. What about all the people who have bought into this whole "Idle Computer processing" deal and installed BOINC (or it's predecessor SETI@Home), or one of the other distributed computing projects out there? Are they just wasting power for everybody? Does the research even matter?
Consider two options: you spend about $7000 for a solar panel system putting out 2.1 kilowatt hours per day. Alternatively, you leave the money in the bank and use the interest to buy offsets. At, say, 5% interest, you can offset 63 tonnes annually. The solar panel system would offset well under a tonne.
Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from a rigged demo
--Andy Finkel (J. Klass?)
Factoid: Something which looks like a fact, but isn't. See Android, Diamondoid.
- Just trying to survive until the nanobots make me immortal -
But in my case (as anyone else living up here) it would only make sense for a couple of months a year. Most of the year the average temperature outside is lower than the temperature in my house. All my gadgets that are on standby (rather than switched off) produce pretty much nothing but heat for the electricity they use. This is fine for me (for the 9 moths a year), as all that electricity is out of my heating bill. So if I would save 24euros/year by switching off, I would ramp up my heating bill by 18euros...
If all else fails, pull the plug and get out...
The Life is out there...
I am not condemning the technology, I have fluorescent bulbs in most of my apartment sockets.
However, to make my point, which - I agree - I didn't do very well, "few examples" relates to practically all Soviet-time fluorescent bulbs I've seen installed in my country - fiendish hue of light (usually white mixed with corpse bluish or sickly purple), bad performance (flash on/off). So some of the older generation in this side of hemisphere are reluctant to put in anything that's called "fluorescent", but good enough, that's changing.
... and they're becoming MORE prevalent, not less. Electronics 101: the primary coil in a wall wart is energized ALL THE TIME that it's connected to the wall, regardless whether the device it's supposed to feed is on or off or even in "standby"; there's a reason the damned things are warm to the touch. I once read an article that quoted an estimate that up to 8% of the average home electricity bill might be attributable to the accumulation of wall warts, and that article was many years ago, while the prevalence of wall warts has been burgeoning ever since. I'd say that trumps the paltry 4% attributed to standby systems.
The next time you buy an electronic product and discover it shipped with a wall wart instead of putting that transformer BEHIND the on/off switch where it belongs, consider returning the device and writing a letter of complaint to the manufacturer and retailer, asking why they're being so callous about wasting energy and making you pay for it? As long as we're stuck with some variant of greed-based capitalism, voting with your dollars is the only way that corporations will demonstrate even a pretense of ethical behavior.
Someone should start a grassroots movement to ban wall warts, and name it something like No More Wall Warts (NoMoWW): "No mo!"
Except you would not be able to make scheduled mid-day VCR recordings. (Which to me is a big deal because all they send in prime time in Europe is pop crap, and the good stuff (ie. reruns from 10-20 years ago and classic movies) are all broadcast during ... working hours. Yay for that.)
Unless you get a power-strip with a timer, which can communicate with your VCR. Like that's gonna happen...
"Good news, everyone!"
It means you have a boot squence where you use a *LOT* of power.
I have a "Watt's Up Pro" watt meter. I've tested it: 200 Watts average during boot, 120 Watts idle. The amount of electricity it takes to boot for 60 seconds (@~200W) is quickly going to pale in comparison to leaving it on for hours at a time... Obviously, YMMV.
And where you do a LOT of reading/writing to/from disk.
Mostly reading on boot actually. And disks R/W heads are designed to handle *a lot* of that during their lifetimes. The biggest concern in my mind frankly is the shock of spinning the disk up time and time again -- this *IS* hard on them drives!
And you have to sit around and wait for your computer to boot.
True, but what's 60 seconds gonna cost ya?
And then reopen everything you closed when you shut-down.
Hibernate.
I'll admit it, I do leave my computer on most of the time for convenience and because I access it remotely from work throughout the day, but I would clearly save money on the electricity bill if I it was shut down for a good part of the day.
Once a day!
It is not like you have there in fron of your machine and wait.
Go and take a piss, wash some dishes, polish your toilet bowl.
There are hundreds of things you can do in those two minutes.
If the only consequence of our actions were the fucking pandas getting borked, well, so bad.
But we are talking global warming, we will all be screwed in a way or another.
Think about that (and the pandas, they are very interestng animals) next time you sit in fron of your 24x7er.
IANAL but write like a drunk one.
Those 2 minutes while the machine boots do not have to be spent sitting in front of it.
Do something else for bunnies sakes.
There, I saved you 14 minutes of your precious time a week.
IANAL but write like a drunk one.
If your car takes 50% of your energy use, you could use the car 10% less and save a similar ammount. However, that would mean a real sacrifice or change in your lifestyle.
Getting real power off again won't change squat in your life so it is a "free" saving.
In sleep my G5 Quad draws 18 watts. 250 watts working under a typical load and 340 with all 4 cores running flat out.
My Core 2 Duo iMac sleeps at 2 watts, runs at 44, and 65 when pushed to its limits.
If I didn't have absolutely NOTHING to do, I wouldn't be here.
That's up to device user to bother about its accomplishment. If users find it meaningful for themselves to cut off power consumption they are welcome. And it could be a kind of ripple effect in the economy when new branches will open providing user with power consumption solutions :))
Have fun while you live
$0.11/KWh * 1 year = $0.11/KWh * 8766 H = $964/KW = $0.96/W
In other words, a 1-watt device run 24-hours a day for a whole year costs about $1. Thus, your 5-watt clock-radio in the guest bedroom is $5, the 22W stereo standby costs $22, the cell-phone charger, the battery chargers, the microwave clock, the standby on the TV, the UPS on the computer -- they all add up to a modest but avoidable cost.
--- Jason Olshefsky
Karma: Poser (mostly affected by adding this line long after everyone else did)
Watts = VA * PF
VA = volt.ampere
PF = Power Factor
What happens is that, unless you have a perfect resistor as a load (nothing but an incandescent light bulb basically), voltage and current are not in sync. Power, measured in Watt, is the product of voltage by current, AT A GIVEN TIME.
But if you read what's display on a AC voltmeter, it will show you the max voltage in the sinusoid. Same goes for current, you will read the max.
In reality, being Alternating Current, both are a sinusoid function. Intensity could be zero while voltage is at its max. In effect, that translates to zero power being transmitted at that particular time.
Yeah, my (family's) IBM PS/1 box fom *1993* had a hibernation-like feature called RapidResume, but my present box still doesn't auto-reconnect everything after waking up.
Here in the US, the first generation of compact fluorescents were pretty bad: poor color temperature, terrible start-up time (taking several minutes to come to full brightness--some cheap bulbs are still like this), etc. The decent-brand bulbs, like Sylvania, are now quite good: the color temperature is a nice white without any blue, they come on very quickly at full brightness, etc.
As usual, the first adopters of a new technology get screwed and everyone is wary of it for a long time afterwards.
Soft power allows the operating system to automatically shut the machine down during periods of activity in order to save power, and was implemented as part of the energy star program.
When you turn the PC off manually, obviously you can also turn of the manual power switch on the back of the machine.
That is a rare example. Most large office/lab/warehouse/manufacturing buildings are lit by flourescent or high-pressure sodium lighting (which is actually more efficient in lumens per watt than flourescent) already, and have been since the 1950s. You will be hard pressed to find any other example as extreme as the one you mention.
Why bother with flash when you already need a battery to power your real-time clock? Or do you want to go back to the dark days of the IBM PC XT, where it prompted you for the date and time every time you turned on the computer?
I disagree. All modern OS use NTP to synchronize their clocks anyway. As soon as your network stack is initialized at boot time, do an NTP lookup and set the clock.
What's the cost of 8MB of flash? Approximately nothing. Rather than solder the chip to the board, I'd just put an SD slot on it! If you nuke it, you just remove the card, which for your convenience, would come from the factory stamped with your motherboard brand/model/revision, insert into a reader, and "re-flash" with the latest firmware file. Or take it to someone who can.
Hrm. I seem to vaguely remember my mum telling a story to someone when I was a kid (I grew up in New Zealand), about how during the winter our power company would call us and ask why we had turned off our water-heater.
Obviously it was a significant and obvious enough drop that they knew which device it was.
Her answer: None of your F%&*$n business. *CLICK*
Correct answer: We had an awesome wood-stove built in to our 1930s-era house (located on a farm) which heated both the water and most of the house. The thing would be on anyway, so why not use it to heat *both* the water AND the room(s)?
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