I got my first electric bill for my new house and suddenly I'm on a power-saving kick. I broke out my trusty Kill-A-Watt and measured how much power the various bits of my new audiovisual rack use.

Idle, my rack consumes an astonishing 80 watts. That's like leaving a lightbulb on all the time, and at my punitive rate of $0.35 / kilowatt-hour it's costing me $20 / month just to own this rack. What's it doing?

38W Tivo (Standby mode saves 2W)
35W Five Sonos players
4W Network switch
2W Superfluous power conditioner lights

Of course, it takes more power to actually use the gear.

32W Listening to music upstairs (1¢/hr)
Running three amplified Sonos zone players
85W Main amplifiers (3¢/hr)
Just turning on the amplifier and the subwoofer amp, not actually using it.
4W Watching TV
The Tivo consumes so much power when idle that actually watching it doesn't add much. Of course, I need the amplifiers on too.
25W Watching Blu-Ray (1¢/hr)
The disc player is hungry. It seems to use this much power even when sitting idle at a disc menu.
184W Playing GTA4 on an Xbox 360 (6¢/hr)
What an inefficient beast. It generates so much heat I have to leave the door open, too. Saves about 30W when sitting idle on the dashboard.
I don't begrudge the operating costs when actually doing stuff, even the Xbox. But 80 watts when idle is terrible. The Tivo is never truly idle, I can understand what it's doing with the power. But why do the amplified Sonos players consume 7W each when doing nothing? At least I can turn off the stupid power conditioner lights.
tech
  2008-10-09 01:46 Z