The True Cost of Standby Power 369
Luther19 writes, "How much do all of our computers and electronic devices sitting in standby mode cost us? The author of the article concludes that he could save $24.44 per year by switching out wasteful power supplies. The article also touches on a global initiative to cut down on standby power, called '1-Watt': 'The idea has been promoted by the IEA, which first developed an international 1-Watt plan back in 1999. Countries like Australia and Korea have signed on officially, while countries like the US require 1-Watt in government procurement, which will have ripple effects throughout the economy. The goal of the program is to have standby power usage fall below 1W in all products by 2010.'" It's estimated that in industrialized countries, devices on standby consume on average 4% of the power used.
I agree with this (Score:3, Funny)
Push these improvements to the manufacturers and make the next generation of devices last longer per watt.
Make them better when they are both on and off.
Also folks, switch off your keyboard indicator lights to save power.
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Re:I agree with this (Score:4, Insightful)
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Their was a definate effect of the gasoline price on long term consumption.
We will feel the benifits of 1 year of expensive gas for about 5 years to come.
Surge in Hybrid sales... (Score:5, Interesting)
Ok, you're trying to be sarcastic. Ask GM and Ford about this. They're both on the ropes because they tooled up for SUVs and then the price of gas went ballistic. Sales of hybrid and other higher efficiency cars have spiked and they're not going to come back down. Toyota is about to pass GM as the world's biggest, and they sell SMALL CARS. They have a sellers market. I know because I was at the dealer two days ago. The salesman was polite, but uninterested in talking. All his Camry's were gone.
So the point is valid; jack the price of electricity and we have new incentives to save power.
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Why you don't see a dramatic change with the huge increase in gas prices is due to the fact that gas has highly inelastic demand. Meaning the demand for gas is very insensitve to prices changes. However, over the long term, there is a higher sensitivity to price (higher elasticity), as new tec
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New PC PSU's might be 10-15% more efficient (Score:5, Interesting)
I ran the numbers a while ago for one of the PC's around here. The last time I ran the calculations, it costs around $50/year to power that PC for about 6 hours per day. So the break even for me is somewhere around 5-8 years! So while the power grid would get a bit of a break, financially, I wouldn't.
I still might get a new PSU, but that's more because I have serious doubts about the quality of the power coming out of the current one (a suspicious # of hard drive deaths...) but that's a separate issue.
For new purchases, definitely go for the more efficient PSUs... as far as "upgarding" goes... it's borderline at best, at least for me.
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I think the grandparent poster is right on that this should be thought of as a medium-long term goal. Get all of the manufacturers to switch over soon, and let natura
Re:New PC PSU's might be 10-15% more efficient (Score:4, Informative)
IMO you should worry about this chit AFTER you've coverted every light bulb in your house to CFL. Until then you're just pissing money away.
Thank You! Mod parent up (Score:3, Insightful)
You got that right. If they just made TVs, VCRs and stereos with non-volatile RAM and a battery powered clock, we could just shut them all off with a power strip. It's no big deal to flip the switch on the power strip when I get home.
Simply have the equipment shut off or unplugged (Score:3, Insightful)
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You missed the point completely. Congratulations.
ATX PCs are never actually turned off. There is always a trickle of power through the PSU and part of the motherboard, in order to support ATX Soft Power, Wake-On-Lan, Wake-On-Keypress, Wake-From-USB, etc.
Typical CRT monitors are never actually turned off. They keep the tube charged so that you don't have to wait for it to "warm up" when you hit the power switch.
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Re:Simply have the equipment shut off or unplugged (Score:4, Informative)
Excellent point - disk drives suck power (Score:3, Interesting)
Simply don't drive. Or ride a bike. (Score:5, Insightful)
0 watts is better than >0 watts, but only if EVERYTHING ELSE IS EQUAL.
But it's not. If you turn off your computer instead of leaving it on, that affects many things other than just how much power you are using while the computer is off. It means you have a boot squence where you use a *LOT* of power. And where you do a LOT of reading/writing to/from disk. And you have to sit around and wait for your computer to boot. And then reopen everything you closed when you shut-down.
Saving $24/year in power is not worth spending $25/year on failed hard drives. Or on time lost turning your computer on and off again. Or on the power you use booting the thing back up.
Instead of Standby (Score:3, Funny)
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Is this a joke of some sort? I've never heard of that, and it sounds like a pretentious name to boot.
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Ford flipped the switch which he saw was now marked 'Mode Execute Ready' instead of the now old-fashioned 'Access Standby' which had so long ago replaced the appallingly stone-aged 'Off'.
Traditional Power (Score:2, Funny)
I have recently switched to a steam powered laptop. Nothing like coal and water.
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James Watt XXIII
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You sir, have obviously never used a Macbook Pro. Especially sitting on your lap while you wear shorts.
Re:You bastard. (Score:4, Funny)
Unless you and/or your employer signed up for wind generated power, your laptop runs on electricity probably generated by one of these 3 things:
1) A nuclear power plant,
2) a coal fired plant that generates steam that then runs turbines to generate electricity,
3) another power plant with coal replaced by natural gas.
So, in fact, many people actually *do* have a steam powered coal fired laptop.
Pareto (Score:5, Insightful)
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Re:Pareto (Score:5, Funny)
So go ahead, call us idiotic. Carry your hip "I won't stand by for standby" signs, and lobby Congress to ban devices that consume "unused power." But when the famine arrives -- and it will arrive -- don't say you weren't warned.
Now if you'll excuse me, I'm going to go stock up on canned goods.
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Re:Pareto (Score:5, Informative)
Analyzing your budget, you decide you need to cut back. While it appears that cutting the $700 mortgage would be the best way to save money, in actuality you're better off cutting out the $19.99 Netflix subscription to movies you never watch.
If that makes any sense, you'll know what I mean - while cutting the largest consumer of power or money may *seem* like the best place to start, it's often a necessary function which just cannot be cut. However, cutting back on unnecessary waste, even if it's a mere 4%, can be a great investment of effort.
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http://www.aceee.org/consumerguide/topfridge.htm [aceee.org]
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Seriously, here's a question. I noticed that my APC UPS has SmartTrim enabled and the line voltage is high. Now it hasn't always been this way and seems to happen every fall around here. My question is, if I'm paying for kilo-watt hours and watts are volts * amps, am I paying more when the voltage is higher? If so, is the power co. ripping me off?
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Yes, if you have a big resistor connected to your power mains.
Most equipment uses a certain amount of power. So if the voltage is high, the equipment uses less current (amps). The power is the same. This is especially true for things like switching power supplies, which only switch on (hence the name) a sufficient percentage of the time to get the power they need. Linear power suppli
Cost benefit? (Score:5, Insightful)
Not _your_ savings... (Score:2)
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I'm guessing about 4% less. That's still not much.
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True, but that's not the goal. (Score:5, Insightful)
But, the point is that if the industry had spent just a few dollars (maybe pennies) more in designing the devive, they'd be saving you money and it's be worth the extra costs. Right now most consumers have no idea the amount of money it costs them for these inefficient electronics, so there's no incentive for manufacturers to bother.
Yes, "redesign" things back! (Score:3, Interesting)
Yes by all means. Let's get rid of those stupid little LEDs on the front of all my new A/V components telling me "I'm turned off right now, but if I were turned on this light would be off". Sure the power bill effects are marginal at best, but it is the annoyance factor of all those things with lights on at night. There is no good reas
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The standby cost is the result of inefficient transformers in power supplies that manage to suck power from the grid without doing anything with it.
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Those LED's cost next to nothing, I would guess on the order of pennies per decade.
This is only marginally on topic, but: Why guess? Is it really so hard to multiply a couple numbers? Are you really saving yourself effort buy operating on the basis of ignorant guesses when you could inform yourself within a few seconds by taking a run-of-the mill number for an LED, say 1.6V 20mA makes 32mW, makes 32mWh per hour. Times 24 is 768mWh per day, comes to somewhere under 300Wh per year. Around here we pay ~10c/
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True, but how about when you have to buy a new PSU (new computer/device) or replace your current PSU when it shells out? Then it becomes economical.
Not quite the same thing with incadescent [wikipedia.org] vs. CFL [wikipedia.org] though. You'd be better off replacing all of them right now because the marginal cost of a regular bulb (~$0.50) is much less than the energy savings of a CFL (~$36.00 YMMV).
Check it yourself (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Check it yourself (Score:5, Informative)
Factoid: if all American households would not use the stand-by mode of their TV, an entire _nuclear_ power plant can be saved on a national level.
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Re:Check it yourself (Score:4, Interesting)
My main problem with the wattmeter gizmo is that I could not use it on the items that I guessed were using a large percentage of the power, namely dishwasher, hot water heater, and dryer. Either the items did not run on 117 VAC or they were wired directly without a plug.
Re:Check it yourself (Score:5, Informative)
A transformer with no load (probably in your case - most lamps with halogen lamps have the switch on the secondary side) is almost a perfect inductive load. Current and voltage are not in sync and the (real) power is very close to zero.
Not all instruments can show this correctly. Especially not if they measure voltage and current separately without taking the phase shift in account (as is often the case with cheap stuff). Switching power supplies (almost everything electronic uses one of those today) are also hard to measure. You need a high sampling frequency if you want to accurately measure the power they draw from the mains. Again, consumer instruments don't have this because fast AD converters are expensive.
Just about the _only_ instrument I would trust outside the lab is the watt-meter the power distribution company installed in your house. These things have to go through very thorough testing before they are approved.
Re:Check it yourself (Score:4, Informative)
Even better it could save coal usage, which puts out more radiation than nuclear plants do, and still pollutes otherwise.
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1W from one source (Score:2, Interesting)
It'd get even better if I could teach my Tivo to turn on/off my
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Now, the only UPS in the house protects TiVo and the cable box. Its surge suppressors protect the TiVo modem line, the Teevee, the VCR, and the DVD player.
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You can also get power strips with a USB cable. They only supply power when they detect voltage on the USB line -- so turn off your computer, and the peripherals turn off too. Unfortunately there are computers which won't turn o
Re:1W from one source (Score:5, Informative)
Is this [smarthomeusa.com] the one you're talking about? Looks like a good solution, from what I can tell; I'm intrigued. Combine that with using compact fluorescent lights instead of incandescent light bulbs as possible, and you can significantly reduce your home's electricity consumption.
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Wasting energy when powered down (Score:4, Interesting)
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If your PC uses an ATX power supply [wikipedia.org] (introduced in 1995) it never turns completely off. That's the point of the article.
Or see the post [slashdot.org] in the discussion where a guy's lamp draws 25W when off. Care to clarify?
And it costs how much? (Score:2, Funny)
But there's another cost:
How much does it cost in lost productivity, over a year, while people wait for their monitors and computer to "warm up" from power-save mode every time they've left their desks or done something OFF the computer for too long?
And for recreational machines: In lost lifetime? How much is YOUR life worth to you?
Never mind productivity... (Score:3, Interesting)
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I know I hate certain standby devices with long warm-up times, like printers and photo copiers. They need intelligent clocks built in to watch usage patterns. M-F at 8am (or whenever usage usually occur
Why use standby? (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Why use standby? (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Why use standby? (Score:4, Insightful)
Is $25 a year that critical to your budget? Hell, I'm reading this thread while drinking a bottle of Scotch that cost 6 times that much.
And let's see... 5 seconds for turning on a PC, figure I do that a minimum of 3 times per day, 300 days per year. That's 75 minutes (1.25 hours) per year. At my current billing rate that equates to $75 per year. So I'm supposed to give up $75 of my time to save $25?
Right now (Score:2)
This is possible the only advantage of living in England. That and the beer.
As for people with their AC on... switch it off! You can aclimatise to heat easily as long as you never go near air conditioned space. It normally takes me a week to get back into the swing of things but I'm pe
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But in the summer, once it gets above 22 degrees c, it feels like a sauna to me. I have to run the AC at anything over 24 or else I simply can not sleep.
Dehumidifer = A/C w/ slower fan. (Score:2)
Unless you are using a disposable dessicant (like Silica), a dehumidifier IS an air-conditioner, and requires no less energy to operate. It is just one that puts the heat back into the room instead of outside. An A/C an be used as a quite effective dehumidifier if you slow the blower speed. This incr
Not just power savings (Score:4, Insightful)
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They still do - it's located on the back of the power-supply as opposed to being on the front.
Could be worse - ~1995-1998, there were plenty of computers that automatically turned themselves on (by default) as soon as the phone rang, complete with the two minute bootup sequence. This principle still exists today, as m
It really isn't that much... (Score:2, Insightful)
Plus, who will feed the starving families of the power companies when we all start using $24 less of power each year!
micro-generation (Score:3, Insightful)
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Household Energy Usage (Score:5, Informative)
http://digitalcrusader.ca/archives/2006/10/househ
I learned that my Stereo system consumes 22W when on "standby" and only about 35W when in use - what a total waste! So I put it on a power bar. My older TV is 0W standby, and all the newer Wall Warts that I have seem to be OK as well - 4 of them together only rate 1W. Your milege may vary
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Aren't you being hard on that poor stereo? I mean, it has to power an infrared receiver so that the remote control will work. According to this government study [lbl.gov], the IR receiver alone uses 0.05 watts all by itself! Once you factor in the overhead, all the wires and circuits and ohms and such, 22 watts makes complete sense.
Yep. Complete sense...
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If things can use virtually no power on standby, i'll never understand why everything isn't designed that way. It irritates me when people go around saying no to put stuff on standby, why aren't they forcing (not telling, forcing) manufacturers to make a better, more efficient, standby?
Could someone tell me. (Score:2)
I mean why is it so difficult to just turn it on?
You don't understand... (Score:4, Informative)
This is only very loosely related to your idea of laptop-style standby mode.
Obeying the laws of thermodynamics (Score:2, Redundant)
So, using full power costs less than by using standby? I suppose I can cool down the kitchen by leaving the fridge door open, too? Maybe I should leave the hot water running to cut down on my power bill?
Re:Obeying the laws of thermodynamics (Score:4, Insightful)
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You mean 154Wh, not 154W.
Battery Chargers and other AC adaptors (Score:2)
http://www.thinkgeek.com/gadgets/electronic/7657/ [thinkgeek.com]
While hooking it up to every little device I could find, I found that battery chargers, such as those for your drill or cell phone, are using electricity while their respective devices are not even connected to them. Granted, it's not much power, but with 5 or 6 of them plugged in, and no devices even attached to them.. thats wasteful. So.. unplug 'em if you aren't using them.
For about half the year, I don't care. (Score:2)
It matters at a business (Score:2)
Another poster pointed out that incandescent bulbs are a horrible waste. Gummint could help by switching out traffic light, street lighting, etc. to more efficient LED
1 Watt (Score:2)
I'd love for the government to work toward's most devices using 1 watt or less. Those walkaround phones, TVs, ceiling fans are a few
Standby Power and Consoles (Score:3, Interesting)
Small Potatoes (Score:4, Insightful)
GT saved $2mil (Score:5, Insightful)
As part of it they replaced all of the 300 watt bulbs in the Van Leer build (old EE building) with 20 watt fluorescent lamps. Each lab probably had 10-15 twenty of these power hogs. After the switch our labs were freezing cold! All that extra cooling wasn't needed any more.
Over the course of a year it saves the institute over 2 million dollars. the first million was in direct power reduction, the second million was due to reduction in cooling cost.
how many times are they going to publish this? (Score:2)
http://games.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=06/07/21
Leave them on? (Score:3, Insightful)
At one of the places where I worked I implemented a web page which you could access from the VPN, and type in your PC name and it would wake up your office computer, if in stand-by.
Please invent (Score:2)
How about a media center power strip with a remote control - just a simple on and off - with the option to train it to accept the on and off signals from other remotes?
Or have a media center power strip which can be trained to recognize the power draw of one key device when it's in on rather than standby mode, whe
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stealing from wikipedia :) (Score:2)
I want a real ON/OFF switch (Score:2)
An interesting and relevant article (Score:3, Insightful)
Wasteful television standby settings and the energy efficiency of computers and water heaters are to be targeted in a new legislative drive aimed at slicing 100bn a year from the European Union's energy bill, in a move that could impose Europe's green agenda on the world. Stringent new European Commission energy efficiency targets for items such as electrical appliances and cars could set new global standards, since all imports into the European market would have to comply.
Some previous EU deadlines have resulted in some pretty dismal performances (the Lisbon agreement springs to mind), but the EU's very high standards for energy efficiency and recycling have been adhered to across the continent with admirable results. Not to mention the fact that EU enforced limits on car pollution (as one example) have led to high efficiency cars in Europe and across the globe, as manufacturers are forced to comply with EU levels to gain access to the EU market.
The proposed regulations - including extensions of existing rules - would impose European energy efficiency standards on any company worldwide seeking access to the EU's 480m consumers, including US manufacturers. European standards and norms in the car sector and mobile telephony have already become accepted in many countries worldwide, to the annoyance of Washington, which believes the EU sets too many rules.
If there is one criticism that is levelled at the EU a lot, is that it sets too many rules. But the high standards they have raised in efficiency for cars and electronics (think about those EU energy labels on all fridges, freezers and so on, they've come a long way from D's and E's a decade ago, how much energy did that initiative save?), so it's A-OK by me.
Re:1 Watt Post! (Score:4, Funny)