Holiday Tech Cravings And Power Savings

The reader interest in last week’s LED Christmas light-themed blog entry was…umm…unexpected. I mean…wow. I’m not complaining, mind you, quite the contrary. It just never fails to crack me up…I spend several hours carefully crafting an in-depth analysis of some topic or another, and I get…zilch (relatively speaking). Then I snap a few photos, add a bit of commentary and get…a blizzard of hits. Unpredictable impermanence, I guess.

Anyhoo…a notable percentage of the reader comments were, not surprisingly, focused on power consumption comparisons between LEDs and traditional incandescent bulbs. As such, with apologies to my cohort Margery Conner who does an absolute killer job of covering power on a day-to-day basis, I’m today going to expand on the theme albeit in a consumer electronics-focused direction that specifically comprehends all of the last-minute shopping many of you will probably be doing this weekend.

Let’s first look at ‘vampires’, i.e. all of those AC/DC converting (sometimes just for power, other times specifically for mobile equipment battery-charging) wall warts that the gear you’ll be buying in the coming days comes bundled with. As you can tell just by putting your hand up against one of them and ‘feeling the heat’, they’re not 100% efficient…they waste electricity even when whatever they’re tethered to is turned off. And, as a result, I have friends who anal-retentively punch the off switch on the power strip whenever the hardware connected to it is not in use.

The more ‘mellow’ (aka lazy) among you can buy remote-controlled power strips (which, consumers probably don’t realize but I bet you engineers caught right away, obviously contain always-on circuitry to monitor for incoming infrared or RF transmissions), and companies even make power strips that automatically shut off when the current sourced through them drops beyond some predefined threshold. But just how much power does a wall wart ‘leak’? Over a year, about the same as it takes to draw a single hot bath, or to drive 6 minutes, according to University of Cambridge researcher David MacKay (PDF, and thanks to Boing Boing for the heads-up).

Readers, I gotta ask…is buying an exotic power strip worth it, counterbalancing the incremental cost against the cost of the electricity you’ll save as a result? Or dare I say it, even bothering to switch a conventional power strip on and off?

Next, let’s look at the aforementioned ‘gear connected to the wall wart’ (or direct-connected to the power plug, if the AC/DC converter’s embedded inside). Folks might be deceived into thinking that it’s not sucking much juice, just because they can’t hear a fan running or see an active output on the display tethered to it. Reality is unfortunately often contrary. EDN’s Paul Rako, for example, mentioned the prodigious power appetites of set-top boxes ten days back. I’ve previously mentioned several times (including in a direct predecessor to this post) that Nintendo’s Wii keeps sucking lots of juice when in standby by virtue of the WiiConect24 feature. Intel’s now-defunct Viiv entertainment PC initiative was similar; it achieved ‘InstantOn’ because when you turned it ‘off’, all you actually did was disable the graphics card output.

Transitioning Apple TV into true standby is non-intuitive; you need to either press and hold the ‘menu’ button for around 10 seconds or, with the latest firmware release, navigate to the standby option in the user interface menu system. The actual system status is deceptive because the unit doesn’t include an audible fan, but put your hand on the top of the case (or look for the tiny glowing LED on the front panel) to discern if what in effect is a keyboard- and mouse-less Apple computer is fully on or not. The fan-inclusive VUDU unit I used to use couldn’t be turned off at all, for perhaps obvious reasons. Nor can, alas, my fan-less Roku Netflix Player, although in this case the reason why isn’t so cut-and-dry.

Most PC-derived gear does include fans, of course, at least for use in fully active situations. Take my NASs (network-attached storage units), for example. The Linksys NAS200 is finally behaving as expected, courtesy of recent firmware upgrades; the HDDs spin down after several minutes of non-use, followed shortly thereafter by the system fan. Conversely, whereas the ReadyNAS automatically spins up and down (but not off) the system fan depending on the sensed system temperature at the time, I cannot for the life of me keep the unit’s four HDDs spun down. A minute or few after the heads park, I hear the platters ramp back up to speed, even if nothing on my LAN has accessed the device.

Perpetually active services (such as TwonkyMedia constantly searching for new content, or regular DDNS monitoring, though I’m not sure why the latter would require active HDDs) could explain this behavior, but nothing I’m aware of fits this description; I’ve got TwonkyMedia configured to automatically update its database only once per day, for example. I’m going to reach out to NETGEAR (who bought Infrant in May of 2007) to see if they can help me figure out what’s going on…for now, I’ve got the HDDs perpetually spun up in the belief that doing so produces less aggregate wear-and-tear over time as compared to schizophrenic spin-up and –down repetitions.

Don’t get me started on the always-on router and its USB-tethered HDD, the print server, the VoIP adapters or the Ethernet switches…What gear in your lair burns more power than you’d prefer, folks, and how are you dealing with its demands?