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.

Comments

Simply have the equipment shut off or unplugged

[Anonymous Coward]

Then it will be using 0 watts. Much less than using standby.

Pareto

[EaglemanBSA]

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.

Cost benefit?

[suparjerk]

I'm not sure the effort and materials costs associated with replacing a power supply are worth $24 per year...

Not just power savings

[Rosco P. Coltrane]

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...

Re:I agree with this

[purpledinoz]

Make electricity more expensive, then people will make a huge effort save power... Take advantage of capitalism.

True, but that's not the goal.

[Vellmont]

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.

Small Potatoes

[oiper]

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.

Re:Obeying the laws of thermodynamics

[241comp]

I don't think they mean that the per-hour cost of standby power exceeds the per-hour cost of having the device on but rather that you may have a device which uses 7W in standby 22hrs/day and 60W on for 2hrs/day (LCD TV?). This means that on the average day, the device uses 154W in standby and 120W while in use. Over the lifetime of the device (say, 900 days), the device uses 30KW more in standby than it did while in use. Another example of this is your hot water heater/tank. If you have an older, less insulated tank, you may be able to reduce your hot water power usage by more than 50% by getting an on-demand water heater which eliminates standby power usage.

Re:Why use standby?

[CreatureComfort]

Is $25 a year that critical to your budget? Hell, I'm reading this thread while drinking a bottle of Scotch that cost 6 times that much.

And let's see... 5 seconds for turning on a PC, figure I do that a minimum of 3 times per day, 300 days per year. That's 75 minutes (1.25 hours) per year. At my current billing rate that equates to $75 per year. So I'm supposed to give up $75 of my time to save $25?

GT saved $2mil

[Malluck]

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.

Simply don't drive. Or ride a bike.

[raehl]

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.