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

I agree with this

[LiquidCoooled]

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.

Re:I agree with this

[purpledinoz]

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

Simply have the equipment shut off or unplugged

[Anonymous Coward]

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

Re:Simply have the equipment shut off or unplugged

[homer_ca]

To put some actual numbers on it, I've measured ATX standby consumption on a few PCs with an AC power meter. They range from a low of 2W for an NForce4 system with a good quality Seasonic PSU to 8W for an NForce2 system with a cheapo no-name PSU that had an LED fan that stayed lit and kept spinning slowly even in standby. The NF4 system could also suspend to RAM which is almost the same as standby but with power still going to RAM. That used about 8-9W. That's bad compared to shutting off, but better than the 50-60W from the computer powered on and idle.

Re:1 Watt Post!

[Bob Cat - NYMPHS]

/. could save some electrons by getting these first post guys off of standby.

Instead of Standby

[SurturZ]

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.

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.

Re:Pareto

[boingo82]

Cutting out the largest sources isn't always the place to focus your efforts - allow me to draw a really bad analogy here:

Analyzing your budget, you decide you need to cut back. While it appears that cutting the $700 mortgage would be the best way to save money, in actuality you're better off cutting out the $19.99 Netflix subscription to movies you never watch.

If that makes any sense, you'll know what I mean - while cutting the largest consumer of power or money may *seem* like the best place to start, it's often a necessary function which just cannot be cut. However, cutting back on unnecessary waste, even if it's a mere 4%, can be a great investment of effort.

Re:Pareto

[StikyPad]

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. The only thing we're doing is moving the energy consumption back to FOOD. This ridiculous proposal to eliminate standby power will result of a food crisis of never-before-seen proportions as couch potatoes everywhere compensate for the extra physical activity by eating more.

So go ahead, call us idiotic. Carry your hip "I won't stand by for standby" signs, and lobby Congress to ban devices that consume "unused power." But when the famine arrives -- and it will arrive -- don't say you weren't warned.

Now if you'll excuse me, I'm going to go stock up on canned goods.

Cost benefit?

[suparjerk]

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

Check it yourself

[ScooterBill]

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.

Re:Check it yourself

[StarfishOne]

Mind you: it's not always a device with an explicit stand-by mode. I once used such a wattmeter on all devices and learned that my 40W lamp with a seemingly #$%#$% cheap transformer was using 25W while "off"!

Factoid: if all American households would not use the stand-by mode of their TV, an entire _nuclear_ power plant can be saved on a national level. :S

Re:Check it yourself

[Crispy Critters]

My old HP printer used as much power turned off as it did turned on and waiting. I took to unplugging it. I guess this arises from using an inefficient transformer and putting the power switch on the low voltage side.

My main problem with the wattmeter gizmo is that I could not use it on the items that I guessed were using a large percentage of the power, namely dishwasher, hot water heater, and dryer. Either the items did not run on 117 VAC or they were wired directly without a plug.

Re:Check it yourself

[Avian visitor]

I can tell your from experience (this is one of the more popular demonstrations in the power engineering lab) that cheap watt-meters can be terribly wrong with loads that are not simple resistors.

A transformer with no load (probably in your case - most lamps with halogen lamps have the switch on the secondary side) is almost a perfect inductive load. Current and voltage are not in sync and the (real) power is very close to zero.

Not all instruments can show this correctly. Especially not if they measure voltage and current separately without taking the phase shift in account (as is often the case with cheap stuff). Switching power supplies (almost everything electronic uses one of those today) are also hard to measure. You need a high sampling frequency if you want to accurately measure the power they draw from the mains. Again, consumer instruments don't have this because fast AD converters are expensive.

Just about the _only_ instrument I would trust outside the lab is the watt-meter the power distribution company installed in your house. These things have to go through very thorough testing before they are approved.

Re:Check it yourself

[Shadowlore]

Factoid: if all American households would not use the stand-by mode of their TV, an entire _nuclear_ power plant can be saved on a national level. :S

Even better it could save coal usage, which puts out more radiation than nuclear plants do, and still pollutes otherwise.

Wasting energy when powered down

[jizziknight]

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.

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...

Household Energy Usage

[EricBoyd]

I just finished a comprehensive audit of all the electricity drawing devices in my house:

http://digitalcrusader.ca/archives/2006/10/househo ld_energ.html

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 :-)

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.

Re:Why use standby?

[Tiger4]

In the five seconds I'm waiting for it to restart, I'll forget why I wanted to turn it on. Modern society functions on IMMEDIATE gratification of desries. Are you trying to kill us all?

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.

New PC PSU's might be 10-15% more efficient

[WoTG]

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.

Re:New PC PSU's might be 10-15% more efficient

[rs79]

Why do I get the impession this is like people that drive all over town to save a penny on the price of gas then spend twice as much as they should on say, bell peppers and underwear cause they just aren't careful.

IMO you should worry about this chit AFTER you've coverted every light bulb in your house to CFL. Until then you're just pissing money away.

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.

You don't understand...

[ClayJar]

"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.

Re:You bastard.

[plopez]

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.

So, in fact, many people actually *do* have a steam powered coal fired laptop. :)

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.

Surge in Hybrid sales...

[mollog]

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.

Re:1W from one source

[jdgeorge]

Around here you can buy power strips with a special "TV" socket. Plug the TV in the TV socket, and the rest (DVD etc.) in the other sockets. As soon as the power strip detects the TV using less than 20W, it powers off the other sockets. At least that way it's only the TV on stand by.

Is this the one you're talking about? Looks like a good solution, from what I can tell; I'm intrigued. Combine that with using compact fluorescent lights instead of incandescent light bulbs as possible, and you can significantly reduce your home's electricity consumption.

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.