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?

[bzipitidoo]

10 watts is bad. It's also typical. Last time I checked, some 6 years ago, AT&T's U-verse DVR box used about 10 watts while on standby. While 10 watts at a cost of a dollar per month doesn't sound like much, it adds up. If you have 3 game consoles, 3 DVRs, and a bunch of wall warts for recharging cell phones and whatever other battery powered devices you have, you could be spending $10 per month. And why burn it if a better design can work just as well and not use so much energy?

I have done a lot to cut my power use. And it's made a big difference. Went from about 10,000 KwH per year to 5,000 KwH. You don't get there by ignoring 10 watts. I did it by living with higher temps in the summer and lower in the winter (83F and 68F respectively). That was the biggest. Even after that, heating and cooling is still by far my biggest energy user, accounting for about 50% of my total usage. Have always had heavy drapes. But it's always frustrated me just how bad the cookie cutter house I have is for keeping temperatures comfortable without wasting megawatts of energy. The moronic builders put the outdoor part of the A/C on the west side of the house. Those guys who want to sell the expensive double pane windows could never justify the price. 30 year payback? Not doing that. I changed all the incandescent light bulbs for fluorescent, and now am moving to LED, and would like to employ skylights. Have had too many times when the electricity went out while I was in the shower, leaving me in total darkness though it was daylight, as the bathroom is an interior room. A skylight would fix that, and save energy. I got low energy computers, basically laptop designs that were packaged as a desktop. My best one uses 30W max, and that only when running an intense 3D game. If playing video on Youtube, it takes 20W, and if just reading and writing email, it takes 10W. Even so, I have them set to go to sleep after 10 minutes and use almost no power. The best old style desktops with the classic +12/+5/-5 volt power supplies take around 80W. The 80plus program helped with those kinds of power supplies, but it's better to run off a single voltage as laptops do. Another big help was the move from CRTs to flat screens. A CRT uses from 50W to 120W, depending greatly on how bright an image it's displaying and the resolution. Early flat screens use 30W no matter what's being displayed, and now with LED backlighting, that's down to 20W. In 1996, refrigerators took a big leap forward in efficiency. Unfortunately, we had a 1995 model. Finally ditched it, and got one that's twice as efficient. Another appliance that used an unexpected high amount of power while off was the Maytag gas drier of all things. 5W while "off" and doing nothing! Felt warm to the touch on top.

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.

Re:What Would be a Trivial Amount?

[Zontar The Mindless]

Sounds cool. Can you get one of those with a remote?

Re: What Would be a Trivial Amount?

[Firethorn]

Not if they're 'energy star rated' Then the limit is less than 1 watt.

Re: What Would be a Trivial Amount?

[Mousit]

Another very simple idea is to just turn this crap off. Sometimes you have to MAKE it do so, since plenty of electronics nowadays don't have a true "off" option at all. So I put everything on surge protectors that have individually-switched outlets. Easy to find plenty of those on Amazon. Either the power-strip style, or I use the desktop models (the ones intended to sit under a monitor), depending on the application and where I'm putting it. The desktop models look nice inside an enclosed entertainment center, and make for easy switching of the electronics in there.

Either way, being able to physically flip the switch to cut off all those game consoles and those sound systems and those cell phone/laptop/whatever chargers, etc. etc. really helps.

I even installed a timer switch on my water heater (until I can get around to replacing the thing with a tankless instead). I found that the long-cycle heating up of the water when it's turned on via the timer, actually uses less power than "maintaining" the heat throughout the day. Though that certainly depends on your usage, of course. I'm a single person and generally only need it powered for a shower. The water remains hot enough even in the unpowered tank throughout the day for things like hand washing. I was surprised what a difference it made. Most of us Slashdot types probably already have programmable thermostats for HVAC, but you don't really think about your water heater sitting there sucking up power all day maintaining hot water you're not using.

I even have my damn dishwasher on a switch, conveniently right next to the garbage disposal switch. Only gets turned on when I need it. Sure, all this was a pretty fair amount of work at first, but once I'd done it, I literally cut my power bill in half. No joke, no exaggeration. Though again keep in mind I'm a single person and don't generally use a lot of power to begin with, admittedly, but still, slicing my usage in half just by putting crap I wasn't using on switched outlets made a tremendous difference to me. And I really don't think it's inconvenient to go over to the entertainment center and, say, flip the Playstation switch when I want to play that.

And as an added bonus, an unpowered device is one less possible source of circuit failure and fire hazard. That's just a nice little icing on the lower-power-bill cake.

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?

Re:Waste is heat!

[JanneM]

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.