Power Consumption
I borrowed an energy monitor plug this week to check what my home entertainment devices were pulling down. Some surprising numbers:
| Wii (Standby) | 1w |
| Wii (On) | 16w |
| Wii (Max) | 18w |
| TV (Standby) | 0w |
| TV (On) | 118w |
| TV (Max) | 119w |
| Laptop (Charging) | 24w |
| Laptop (Boot) | 58w |
| Laptop (Idle) | 46w |
| Mac Pro (Standby) | 5w |
| Mac Pro (Idle, disk usage) | 180w |
| Mac Pro (Idle, no disk) | 166w |
| Mac Pro (Boot) | 210w |
| Mac Pro (Max) | 218w |
| HTPC (Standby) | 3w |
| HTPC (S3 sleep) | 4w |
| HTPC (Idle) | 80w |
| HTPC (Playing back recorded programme) | 82w |
| HTPC (Watching live TV) | 90w |
| HTPC (Recording one channel, playing back recorded programme) | 100w |
| HTPC (Max) | 105w |
| 19" monitor (On) | 26w |
| 17" monitor (Standby) | 1w |
| 17" monitor (On) | 33w |
I'm a little surprised by the HTPC results. Jeff Atwood has a build quite similar which idles at 46w.
Making some assumptions, I would calculate that the HTPC costs about £48.48 per year (£4.04 per month) to run. That's based on:
- 6 hours a day full usage, total 180 hours a month
- 100w usage for all of those hours
- 4w per hour for the rest
- 720 total hours a month
- 20p per kWh
- Using the handy electricity calculator