How much power is your console wasting in Standby?

[yourbeliefs]

Short answer.. quite a lot..especially if you have an Xbox One

http://www.nrdc.org/energy/game-consoles/files/video-game-consoles-IB.pdf

 

[meStevo]

I've seen some pretty bad linkbait headlines related to this... so i'll defer to someone who's already done the math on how 'bad' this actually is:

A GTX 760 (170w) for 8 hours per day would consume 496.4kWh/y. At 5 hours per day (more reasonable) it would consume 310kWh/y, still higher than Xbox One, not counting ANY other forms of power consumption from the PC.

Breaking down the consumption for Xbox One: If we assume they estimated 8 hours of full consumption usage, using it to watch TV, with 16 hours of off time.. let's math! 289kWh/y = 791.8 watts per day. It consumes 15w per hour of time in standby, so 15w * 16 hours = 240w, leaving us with 551.8 watts per day while on, watching TV. Divide that across 8 hours, and you get 68.97w of power draw, comparable to an incandescent light bulb. Drawing peak power at 1/3 of an entire day. That's about $180 in electricity costs over 5 whole years. Perspective: A modest sized top-freezer refrigerator 5-10 years old will cost about $120 per year to run, or $600 over the same time period. Mind you, my math could be a little off based on how much on/off time was used to calculate, but it's a solid rough estimate.

 

[king3pj]

I don't leave my Xbox One in standby mode because of reports I read about this closer to launch. I changed the setting to energy preferred which shuts the console all the way down when you turn off instead of going into standby. If I used the system more I would use standby for the convenience but so far I've only used it for exclusive games and occasional Amazon Instant/blu-ray use. It doesn't make sense to me to leave it in standby, wasting electricity when it's not being used for 2-3 weeks at a time. I do leave the PS4 in standby because it is used much more frequently.

There are some disadvantages to shutting down all the way. I can't automatically have system and game updates installed while I'm not playing. I can't remotely purchase a digital game and have it downloaded and waiting for me when I get home. I can't use the Xbox On command to boot up the system and it takes longer to boot up from a complete shutdown too.