Measuring How Much "Standby Mode" Electricity For Game Consoles Will Cost You

An anonymous reader writes: Modern game consoles have a "standby" mode, which you can use if you want the console to instantly turn on while not drawing full power the whole time it's idle. But manufacturers are vague about how much power it takes to keep the consoles in this standby state. After a recent press release claiming $250 million worth of electricity was used to power Xbox Ones in standby mode in the past year, Ars Technica decided to run some tests to figure out exactly how much power is being drawn. Their conclusions: the PS4 draws about 10 Watts, $10-11 in extra electricity charges annually. The Xbox One draws 12.9W, costing users $13-$14 in extra electricity charges annually. The Wii U draws 13.3W, costing users $14-$15 in extra electricity charges annually. These aren't trivial amounts, but they're a lot less than simply leaving the console running and shutting off the TV when you aren't using it: "Leaving your PS4 sitting on the menu like this all year would waste over $142 in electricity costs."

Comments

What Would be a Trivial Amount?

[Anonymous Coward]

So about a dollar a month for standby. What would the author consider to be trivial?

Re:What Would be a Trivial Amount?

[Anonymous Coward]

So about a dollar a month for standby. What would the author consider to be trivial?

That isn't trivial at all. 10-13 watts are ridiculous. It should be 0.5 watt or less. Take that one 13 watt appliance and then multiply it by a household of appliances. Suddenly, have a 100 watt incandescent lightbulb running on 24/7 in every household in America souds like it would be frugal in comparison.

I just found out my DVR STB is using 30 watts electricity whether on or not, just so I can turn on a show, and if it happens to be on a channel I like with a show I like, I can go back up to 15-30 minutes and not miss a thing. You know how often that happens? 0. And yet I'm paying in my area nearly $5 a month for this "feature".

Now multiply that by a household of people with a household of appliances, and it will add up to real money. I loved it when things had a hard switch. Now too much shit has a "soft" power shit, initially so it can sense a remote or do something at some time, but in the meantime too much shit has "convenience" few people use.

Here's a list of typical shit that's running constantly (obviously some is useful to have 24/7, but just to get an overview):
-Coffee Machines/many kitchen appliances
-Microwaves, Ovens, Induction Stoves (sorry, I have enough watches in my life, don't need another one to program and be on all the time)
-computers/cell phones/tablets/phones
-wireless landline phones
-stand top boxes / cable boxes for TVs
-video game consoles
-dvd/blu ray
-security camera
-anything with remote, including standing fans and what not
-alarm clock
-refrigerators
-water heaters
-water pump
-sump pump
-ac
-ac/heat controls
-anything with nonstandard on/off feature - motion activated, solar activated, etc

There are obviously a lot of essentials (fridge, etc), but a lot of the countertop appliances and electronics tend to be just energy vampires and if it matters to you, should be put on a outlet which can be turned off completely (without running to the fusebox). It's also wise to switch off all the nonessentials at outlet or fusebox at vacation time (also will help prevent the odd electrical fire).

And companies should be encouraged to cut down the rates via an energy star program and provide that info of offtime usage to the consumer so they can decide at purchase instead of being surprised at home.

Re: What Would be a Trivial Amount?

[mlts]

One idea I've found that works, provided this is possible (i.e. you own the property), and one has the electrical ability, is to have a dedicated circuit for the little devices that comes from an inverter [1] and a set of batteries that charge from a PV panel array.

This doesn't have to be expensive. A common setup winds up being two 6VDC golf cart batteries in series (12 volts total), 2-3 PV panels, a decent charge controller [2], and an inverter. This won't run your air conditioner unit, but it will be big enough to handle a number of low amperage devices, and one can build a decent setup for well under $1000.

In fact, I did a jerry rigged setup to light a shed on the far side of a friend's farm using a cast off extension cord (it had the proper gauge wires when stripped), a cast off 200 watt panel, a $8 PWM charge controller from eBay, an old deep cycle battery, and a DC-DC converter so I could use some 340 lumen SunJack LED bulbs (with built in switches) that run from a USB port. All of this cost well under $100. The SunJack LED bulbs would run 8-10 hours on a 1.2 amp (or 12,000 mAh as the packaging says), so a 200 amp-hour battery that only has 50-75 amp-hours left can run the bulbs for a very long time without solar.

Another added benefit of having all the devices on their own circuit is that they are essentially on a UPS, so if power fails, they will still keep running.

[1]: Don't skimp here... buy a reliable PSW (pure sine wave) inverter, and go for a 1500-2000 watt model even though running at full tilt will discharge the batteries quickly. This is so that if one plugs something in that has an inrush current (refrigerator compressor, microwave), the inverter can handle it.

[2]: You can go with a MPPT controller, which allows for higher voltage panels (as it converts the voltage higher than what the batteries use into a lower voltage with more amps), or have more panels to handle how a PWM controller "lops" off any voltage it doesn't need.

What really is happening?

[Anonymous Coward]

WTF? "Sleeping" should draw way less. It doesn't take a lot of power to keep a couple of sticks of SDRAM alive. Okay, probably also the NIC and a MCU to monitor the remote. I bet your console is reporting to the mother-ship or something.

Re:Just disable it...

[toejam13]

One problem with modern electronics is when the manufacturer figures that you're always going to put your device to sleep instead of fully powering it down, so they don't put much effort into optimizing the boot time from a cold power up.

Take for example desktop PCs. There are some motherboards where the firmware initialization is around two seconds. But I've seen it as high as fifteen seconds for a desktop motherboard and over a minute for a server motherboard, even when you have all of the options set to allow the fastest boot possible. That is a very wide difference from one motherboard to another.

When I read motherboard reviews, very rarely is boot time ever mentioned. So is this a chicken-vs-egg scenario where users don't care about cold boot times because they're happy with standby and hibernate modes? Or do users care, but it is so rarely reported that we always end up with motherboards that drive us to standby and hibernation modes?