Are Our Gadgets Power Hogs? - The Energy Hog on Your Desk

We've all heard how electronic devices "leak" when they're plugged in but not turned on. It started with televisions that come on instantly, because we're all impatient to have things turn on as soon as we flip the switch (and I'm no less impatient than anyone else). Jason Fry found surprisingly little leakage, at least for some items. "My power meter failed to detect even a watt going to waste in chargers with nothing plugged into them; when actually recharging something, our various chargers used about 4 watts each." He did figure out that he could save about $5 per month by instructing his computers to go into "standby" mode instead of "sleep" when not in use.

And that's an interesting point. Do you leave your PC on 24/7? Forbes noted that his around-the-clock PC seemed like it should be "empirically relatively power efficient given that it survives quite happily on a rather anemic 300W power supply, in an era when many advice guides are pushing monster 450W+ units." But it pulls as much as 165W of power when it's doing a demanding 3D application, and 129W when it's just sitting there. That's at least three kilowatt hours a day. Now that's not a lot of money, depending on where you live (in Ontario it comes to $0.32 a day; in New York it would be more like $0.51 a day). But it can add up.

Interestingly enough, Forbes discovered that putting his PC into standby mode only brought it down to 112W from 129W. That saves a little over five kilowatt hours per month - nowhere near the five dollars a month that Fry figured could be saved when he put his system into standby instead of sleep. Forbes did find a mode in XP that took the unused power consumption down to 5W. But that doesn't take into account the monitors (which in his case are CRT rather than LCD), the speakers, the router...well, it adds up.

Do you play on gaming consoles? Then you'll be interested in these figures from Gizmodo. The Xbox 360, in standby mode, leaks 17.52 kwh per year, or about $2.63 in energy loss if you pay $0.15 per year. If you play two hours a day, the unit will cost you more than $20 per year, including the leakage. Ironically, as household appliances have become more efficient, electronics have become bigger energy hogs; the PS2 cost less to run than the Xbox 360, and the PS1 even less. Continuing the power curve, the PS3 sucks up 380 watts of power when played, more than twice as much as the Xbox 360. That means it will cost you $40 a year to run if you play it two hours a day.

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