Power Consumption

This article was posted on 6th June 2009 (279 days ago) in Computers, Science and Technology | Print | Comments

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