Are You Spending $145 A Year Just To Leave Your PS3 On All The Time?
The NRDC has released some numbers about video game consoles and their power consumption. If you're one of the 50% of gamers who leave their consoles on all the time — you're wasting a lot of money.
The NRDC report suggests that video game console manufacturers update the consoles with a power saving mode that would kick in after a period of inactivity — but the quickest fix is for gamers to turn their consoles off (or use the console's power saving features) when they're not actively playing them. The NRDC says that consoles use about the same amount of power just sitting there as they do when you're actually playing them.
How much could you save? At the high end, the NRDC says that PS3 owners who shut off their consoles could save as much as $145 a year. Wii users won't save as much, because the Wii uses less power over all. The XBOX 360 is somewhere in between.
The good news is that the XBOX 360 and PS3 do have power saving features, but they're disabled by default. Why not turn them on and save some cash?
Lowering the Cost of Play [NRDC]
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What do you mean by off?
Off as in switch off?
Off as in unplug cord off?
Ugh. I have everything except the furnace, alarm, and fridge on a master switch that gets turned off when I leave in the morning. Beyond saving money, it also helps me feel better about not accidentally leaving an appliance on and coming home to a piece of charcoal.
Off - like a powerstrip with a switch - not consuming electricity on "standby" mode
"The NRDC says that consoles use about the same amount of power just sitting there as they do when you're actually playing them."
The consoles have 100% CPU AND GPU usage when idle? I feel that this is almost like saying that you burn the same amount of calories if you're either sitting on a couch or running a 5k.
@AngrySicilian: How do you deal with the clocks in the house?
BTW, I've been meaning to do something like that for a loooong time. But having 5 computers throughout the house kinda puts a dent on that idea.
And once again, the Wii beats them all...
My refrigerator uses $63 per year.
I think I know the answer to this already, but here it goes: If you have a plug (the fat ones with the transformer built in) and this plug is just plugged to the power, w/o the gadget connected to it. Does it drain considerable amount of power?
I know it does drain power, because they get warm whether or not they're "in use", but how much power is drained?
I've been guilty of leaving mine on if I wasn't a point I could save or something, but I usually try to unplug all of my electronics/appliances if they are not in use. Seriously, my electric bill has gone from about $45 to $25 once I started doing this.
From this graph and looking at the paper, their "off" listed is the standby mode, where the GPU is off, hard disk and most other elements are off, and the CPU is in a low-power state. I just love it how the PS3 costs more to leave off than the Wii does to run all the time.
I don't see why people don't turn stuff off once they are done with it. With most electronics leaving it on causes more wear than turning it off when done, and it uses more power which translates into more money and more CO2 into the atmosphere.
Best solution: Sell that xbox!
I miss mine terribly.
Ugh- thank you, Husband! He is anal about turning off and unplugging our Xbox after every use.
Also, the Xbox is somewhat noisy when it's turned on- it would bother me to have it running all the time.
@Alex7575: I agree. I remember reading articles on this and the testers who came up with these figures either left games or the protein-folding software running. If your PS3 is just at the XMB doing nothing, I'll bet that the consumption is close to half (the major sources of power draw: CPU/GPU + Power Supply) are hardly being overtaxed at that point.
What irks me is that at this point, my 4 year old PC is taking FOREVER to boot up (too many fonts? too many applications? Symantec AntiVirus?). Whatever the reason, I leave it on 24x7 because I can't be bothered to reboot the fucker.
leave my xbox360 on???? i'm scared shit less of another red ring of death. I am guilty of leaving by ps3 on for long periods of time, so sue me i'm trying to cure cancer (folding@home).
I turn off my computer at night, saves me around $40 a month (from 8/10pm to 4/5am).
Any numbers on how much it costs to leave a computer on all the time?
PC gaming ftw :D
With the sole exception of actually being a fun console beyond the first few days of Wii Bowling.@morganlh85:
$40 a month for your computer to run 7 hours a day. How much is electricity at your place?
@mariospants: LOL, 4yr old? That's like 100 yrs in PC years. Nah, if you're not playing games, that puter should still be gold to pull down some html from the internets. Seems that it needs some TLC (Trash, Litter, Compactor), HAHAhahehe, sorry.
Have you tried getting rid of some start up items? An easy way of doing that is to
-go to the Start button>Run
-type "MSConfig" (not case sensitive), hit Enter.
-go to the startup tab, and go to town. I'd uncheck pretty much everything there, just make sure to keep your antivirus, and the apps you want to run with the system started.
Another thing you can do to speedup the boot process is to use Bootvis (Google). This app attaches itself to the boot process, and gathers boot information, and presents a graph when done. With the graph you can pinpoint which drivers or processes are "hanging" and messing up your boot time.
And for the cherry on the top, I'd defragment the harddrives, after some cleaning up. Delete junk/unused files. If you're not sure if you want to get rid of certain files. Just lump them together in a "temp" folder and copy them out of the drive (burn to DVD, copy to another drive, etc), and defragment it.
And if all the above fails, do what you should have done long ago...Reinstall (sorry).
Good luck!
Have you tried standby?
Both my new and old laptop take for freakin ever to boot. Since I rediscovered the standby quick key. I have saved at least 10 minutes each day.
@Alex7575: All of my clocks, except my alarm clock, are battery powered. I know a lot of people who use cell phones instead of alarm clocks
Even after reading the responses, I'm still unclear as to whether they mean shut them down (like any sane person would) or physically remove their link to a power source. If it's the latter, wouldn't that cause the internal memory to be reset every time (in regards to time, preferences, etc.?) I know my DVD/VCR would. Isn't that a bit impratical?
@mariospants: The cost of everything energy related is up. Oil, natural gas, etc. Why if the fuels for all electricity creation are up in price would electricity be down or free?
Renewables - they are great but they aren't our country's base load energy yet untill the tech catches up with our dreams.
@rbuchberger: It depends on the computer, but for a modern PC, one that can play the latest game, you'll looking at numbers somewhere between the Xbox 360 and the PS3.
This is obviously one of those "worst case scenario" situations. There's no way a PS3 on standby uses almost $150 in electricity in a year. Just the heat output tells you that when it's on it uses way more power. You almost can't touch the thing when it's running...on standby it's cool.
@AngrySicilian: I've got a minor man crush going on here. You do what everyone should do, and I applaud you for it!
@mariospants: But if energy were free, who would pay my salary? No free energy for you!
@LindsayC: doctoral hilarity ensues: Mine has a high pitched squeal I can hear from almost anywhere in the house, even when the disc isn't spinning. I'm with you - I could never leave my 360 on when it's not being used.
@nataku83: I'm pretty much in the same situation, but there are a few clocks around the house that are attached to appliances, like the microwave, the oven, etc. I don't use them as clocks, but it sure bothers me when they're either wrong or blinking.
@mariospants: Just backup your important stuff on an external HD or cd's and format your hard drive. You should do this yearly anyways. Keeps things lubricated.
One of the authors of this paper just posted it over on the Penny Arcade forums, where it is being quite rightfully eviscerated.
A whole lot of the material in it is inaccurate, misleading, or just plain *wrong*. For example, early in the paper, (page 9) the authors claim that an external Blu-ray drive is available for the XBox 360, which is completely untrue. Then just a few pages later, when performing their stress tests of the systems, they explain that since the XBox 360 can't play Blu-ray discs, they had to use the HD-DVD version of King Kong instead. Wait, what? Make up your minds, please.
The most glaring issue, though, is this:
"While we are unaware of any user data revealing the percentage of users who turn off their consoles after use, we have found anecdotally that many users leave their consoles on all the time. Some turn off their televisions at the end of a session and but to turn off peripherals like the console, while others keep their consoles on in order not to lose progress in a game."
They're using _anecdotal evidence_ to prove their wild claim that 50% of all console users leave their consoles on all the time? No, you can't do that in a paper that is pretending very hard to be scientific. Also, the motivations they ascribe to people who don't turn off their consoles are dated and inaccurate. I can't think of a single current-generation game that doesn't have either frequent autosave points, or user-selectable save slots.
The paper had some great points, absolutely: energy-saving features are great things to have, we should all do our part to conserve electricity, and manufacturers should be encouraged to improve their auto-shutoff functionality and add sleep/suspend modes. But it's awfully hard to take a paper seriously when it's riddled with factual errors, grammatical errors, wild speculation, and incorrect assumptions.
I have been thinking about routing everything in my entertainment center through a master switch, so that I can kill the power when it's not in use to stop parasitic power draw from all the different components (I'll bet, with everything I've got there, I still draw 50W or so when everything is in standby). I'd have one power strip connected straight to the socket (for cable box and HTPC), and the other for anything else. The 'anything else' one will be connected through a switch with an IR receiver that will allow me to switch it on as part of the start-up sequence on my Logitech Harmony remote. I'll still be able to sit down and push [Watch TV] with only a bit of added delay before everything kicks on.
@WBrink: Want to know for sure?
Get a Kill A Watt at Amazon for about $20 and test this out for yourself if you are so inclined.
Plug in your game console and turn it on and leave it turned on for a 48 hour period without playing any games and record its usage in kilowatt-hours (kWh).
Plug in your game console and let it sit there for 48 hours without turning it on and record its usage.
Simply multiply the Kilowatt-Hr usage by 182.5(days) and then multiply that by your average cost per Kilowatt hour (normally shown on your electricity bill) and you will have your cost per year for each case study.
Compare those two usage figures and voila, you can know for sure. (You can also compare it to Zero which is the usage while unplugged from the wall.)
More details here at MSN.
I spent my entire life getting up to turn the system on/off and then having a seat only to need to get up and reset it sometimes. This current generation of power-button-on-the-controller is spoiling me and I ain't ever going back.
@InfiniTrent: I have a feeling that this was measured with the consoles "idling" inside a game, I can't figure out how they came up with this information, which I find highly misleading.
Energy conservation should be a priority, at least until we can figure out how to produce it cleanly. Once we get it clean and cheap, I'm buying a fridge + TV + Heater + AC in every room in the house, including bathrooms.
"...you're wasting a lot of [your parent's] money."
There, I fixed it for 90% of owners.
I have always been observant of my power usage; always leaving consoles and computers off when not in use. My habits became even more conservative when I started renting my own apartment, where I pay my own electric bill. Now, my router, modem, and computers are off when not in use, by way of the switch on a surge protector (everyone should do this anyway as protection against hackers and WiFi thieves). Lights go off as soon as I leave a room. I've even replaced a few bulbs with CFL's; I'm hoping in the long run they'll last awhile and add up to savings.
@AngrySicilian: I have a wind up alarm clock from Ikea for the bedrooms and nothing I own blinks 12:00 when the juice comes back on (thankfully). I got tired of replacing 9V batteries on the clock radio. I use my cell phone as an alarm clock (Unfortunately it does tall all 6 alarm settings to get me out of be.)
@ShikhaCadimillac: Well I would have hoped an article about this exact subject matter would provide that information rather than us having to rerun their test to find out if they mean On as in game system running or On as in just plugged in an in standby mode
xbox costs $14 just sitting there "off" huh...
i would love to know how much it is costing me to leave my desktop and my gf's laptop on 24/7
@Gaambit: Reading the paper, it appears they are referring to ON (game system is active on) and OFF (game system is in standby mode).
" Many video game consoles are left on for extended periods of time in Idle mode. Some users simply forget
to turn the video game console off when they turn off their television. Other users leave the consoles on because
some games do not allow them to save their progress any other way, requiring them to leave the console on until
they resume playing hours or days later. In addition, some game designs may also prevent the proper function of
power management for those video game consoles that support auto power-down."
"The next generation of game consoles should be shipped with an auto power down feature that would go into
effect after one to three hours of inactivity. These settings should be the default when shipped and should not
require the user to 'opt in' as is currently required."
I think I read this 6 months ago on Kotaku and nobody could come to a conclusion on whether or not they meant keeping the system "on," turning the system "off," or actually flipping the off switch on the back of the system.