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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."
So about a dollar a month for standby. What would the author consider to be trivial?
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.
Yep, media pans a game console, ohhh, look at the power it consumes when you a playing with a pretend mega yacht but when it comes to the sheer insane waste of an actual mega yacht not just lost resources, a corrupted economy necessary to pay for it but the sheer volume of pollution generated in say one minute consuming the energy of a game in stand by mode for a year and this the quisling shit heads celebrate. Ever hear of main stream media picking on private jets, now how much energy do they waste not only during run time but during operation in year, what something like 10,000 game consoles and TVs to watch the output, again the whine about the energy use of us nobodies but when a somebody consumes at rates 10,000 times the average they through parties and celebrate. Want to see real waste, that is us, letting the 1% exist.
Chaos - everything, everywhere, everywhen
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?
That's fine when you live in an Arctic wasteland, but a good portion of the world population lives in an area where the climate requires active cooling during the summer months. So that waste heat must either be removed using fans or air conditioning, which costs money.
When I lived in a cool city, my Core i7 930 and my wife's Phenom X4 955 were fine. But when I moved to a city where summer temps can exceed 40C, I replaced them with low power (S series) Haswell systems. My July electric bill went down 10% from the previous year. After selling the old equipment, the upgrades will pay for themselves in under 2 years.
It's very inefficient to turn electricity into heat directly. If you wanted heating you'd be better off using a heat pump or other indirect means.
Trust the Computer. The Computer is your friend.
POST (Power On Self Test). The time doesn't include bootstraping to the OS. For example, Dell OptiPlex machines boot very fast when compared with a 3rd party motherboard. Dell PowerEdge servers take a very long time. For those POST includes RAM, DRAC, PERC (raid card), and the IPMI bus.
Life is not for the lazy.
Ok, 0.26 watts. Let's pretend you never have to charge your phone (or you got a new charger and forgot to unplug the new one). There are about 8766 hours/ year. (This takes into account that one out of four years is a leap year.) So that charger is using about 2200 watt hours/ year, or about 2k. The average price for electricity in the US is 12 cents/ kw-hour (http://www.npr.org/blogs/money/2011/10/27/141766341/the-price-of-electricity-in-your-state). So we're talking 25 cents per year to keep this charger plugged in.
That same NPR article says the average American household uses about 900 kw-h/month, or 900,000 watt-hours. A quarter of a watt = 187 watt-hours/ month, or about 0.02% of the average monthly use. Putting this differently, you'd need 50 plugged-in chargers in your home to amount to even 1% of your electricity use.
Not a whole $12.
Wait.
"ANNUALLY" YOU SAY?
Per device.
As an individual you may not care much, but at a wider scale can be a noticable impact on power usage.
If every household in the US (~120m) draws an extra 10w average power, total requirement is arround 1Gw or 1 extra mid/large size coal/nuclear plant (E.g. Three mile island).
If you start adding all the devices you have on standby (inclucing some of the nasy cable boxes that drew upto 50w standby) it starts adding up. This is esentially where the EU regulations for standby power came from in conjunction that for most devices is it costs almost nothing per device to have it use minimal standby power just a bit or care and effort in the design phase of a hardware project.
* Ignore for simplicity that if running heating power is not really wastes, but if running household aircon essentially you double the power usage.
IIRC units are shipped in the EU with the 'instant-on' mode disabled by default, which would meet regs.
So it's superficially a software issue pandering to a chunk of their consumers being by default happy to waste lots of energy all the time (or never realising what's going on) rather than press a button. And we wonder why some places have an obesity and a power-consumption problem!
Rgds
Damon
http://m.earth.org.uk/
The reason for electricity mains operating at a dangerously high voltage is that it reduces the current flowing through the wiring which therefore reduces voltage drops and wasted energy due to heat dissipation in the wiring.
IMHO the best way to maximise power efficiency is to use a decent quality switching power supply, either a wall wart or built in, which is correctly matched to the requirements of the equipment. I think manufacturers are getting better at this, for example my Virgin Media "Superhub" which is supplied with what appears to be a decent quality switching supply so both the hub and the wall wart are only slightly warm to the touch, certainly not hot.
I recall purchasing, something like 10 years ago, a small 5 port Ethernet switch which was supplied with the usual cheap wall wart with a simple transformer and rectifier inside. Both the switch and the wall wart ran uncomfortably hot with, I assume, a linear voltage regulator inside the switch which would have slowly roasted itself to death sometime after the warranty period expired. Not satisfied, I tried powering the switch with a laboratory supply which I adjusted to the minimum voltage required for the switch to operate reliably. Then I purchased from CPC a decent quality switch mode wall wart of the same voltage, which I think cost me several quid more than the switch did, and the switch has been running with no problems, just a little warm, ever since. Having used a plug in power meter on both wall warts I reckoned that the switch mode unit paid for itself in two years and the switch has lasted several times longer than I would have expected it to with he cheap over voltage supply. WIN-WIN!
It's not surprising -- it just isn't worth it for most people. To do it well, you variously need land; upkeep time; knowledge (pests you don't need, creatures you do, plant nutrition, how to harvest without doing damage, control of wastage, fertilizer issues, varietal information, home-cooking skills, canning skills); seed sources; patience; storage, fencing to control animal forage, sometimes a permit...
Or you can just go to the supermarket, buy a bag of salad and a can of beans, come home and cook dinner. Or hit a restaurant.
It's pretty easy to see why most people choose to exchange the labor they do via the obvious proxy (money.). It really depends where you want to put your effort. The money you save -- whatever that is in a particular case -- has to be of at least the same value as your time, otherwise, you're working against yourself.
We have a tower garden here. It was a gift, so the initial cost (to us) was nothing. Even so, the costs for the nutrients and starters and the small amount of electricity the nutrient pump takes adds up to be non-trivial, and the amount of produce isn't fabulous overall, all things considered. The quality of what it produces is, though. Buying it... I wouldn't even think of it. It's expensive. It's also kind of pretty when it's all growing like a little vertical jungle, but that's pretty minor in the larger picture.
I've fallen off your lawn, and I can't get up.
That's not been my experience. I've been through quite a few "modern" refrigerators in my life (I'm 58.) My most recent purchase, a standup freezer, only lasted about a month past the 1-year warranty, and the compressor went nipples north. Cost a fair bit to have that compressor replaced -- even though it's a sealed, lightweight POS. My frig is about three years old, and we're already thinking of replacing it, as the amenities have failed -- icemaker, waterspout, filter system. Modern consumer level refrigerators and freezers just have not done well for me. Flimsy plastic shelves and fittings, ice makers that quit working in no time, filter systems that fail, the very cheapest possible compressors... meh.
There have been many days when I wish I'd thought to collect my mother's refrigerator / freezer. It's still at the old house, cranking along. It's been there since before I was born -- well over 60 years. Never broke down. Never needed repair. Never needed coolant / oil. Dead quiet. Looks pretty dated, all rounded edges and the like (it'd look right at home in a 1940's dwelling) but damn, for the money I've spent, I could have easily lived with it. At this point, it'd sure be a bitch to drag it from Pennsylvania to Montana, though. :)
I've fallen off your lawn, and I can't get up.
$10 a month is $120 in a year, $1200 in ten years, $4800 over a working lifetime (40 years or so.) The question isn't what can you buy with $10. The question is, what could you buy with $4800? That, and how much will it cost to save that $4800, because that has to be taken right off the savings.
Math. Do you have it?
I've fallen off your lawn, and I can't get up.