Standby power on Ars Technica

Ars Technica had an article this past weekend about standby power called Please Standby. The article talks about the 1 watt initiative which will bring electrical devices down below 1 watt standby power.

Audio/Video power phantoms

This week, I measured the power consumption of my Audio/Video system in the den. As I mentioned in a previous post, I've been using a Kill-A-Watt to measure the energy consumption of various electrical devices.

My A/V stack consists of a DVD player, 6 disc cd player, dual cassette player, stereo receiver, XBox, a projection TV, and a cable DVR. I have set everything except the DVR into a power strip that I can turn on and off to cut the phantom power usage. The complete stack (minus the DVR) uses 33 watts when everything is turned off. Using the power strip saves me about $17 per year (since electricity is about 6 cents per kilowatt-hour this month - Thanks for the October surprise Entergy). Just for comparison's sake, the projection tv, the xbox, and the stereo use 282 watts when running.

The Cox DVR uses 24 watts when booting, but then goes on to use 44 watts whether the on/off light is on or off. This means I'll pay about $23 per year for its power, since it's always on and doesn't seem to have a low power mode.

Game Console Power Consumption

I started to look into the Xbox power usage, but found this article on the subject. It goes into various details about how the consoles stack up to each other, whether they should be used as a DVD player, and their phantom loads. The more you know...

PC Power Consumption (Easy savings!)

I showed in a previous post how to cut the power usage on your PC by enabling software power saving options. However, I've found that the possibilities for savings are rather large. My 3 Gigahertz Pentium PC uses between 124 watts and 206 watts. When in standby mode, that drops to 2 watts. (Hard Drive off mode doesn't appear to affect power consumption much). Also, my 19" CRT uses about 68 watts when on and 1 watt in standby mode. Obviously, it's better to shut the machine down, however, simply by engaging the power saving functions in software, I'm not using up to 275 watts if I forget. That can really add up over the life of the PC.

Also, when it's time to upgrade, a 15" flat panel uses 17 watts when running and 1 watt in standby. This would also save some money considering the amount of time I sit in front of the computer.