If you’re pushing the boat out and buying a new games console this Christmas, or if you already have a video game system in the house, you might be interested to see how they match up in terms of power consumption – a hidden cost of owning such gadgets.
This post at Consumerist shows the annual cost of the most popular consoles, for those who leave their consoles on all the time and those who switch them off after each use. Although the figures are quoted in US$, the difference between the power consumption of the Nintendo Wii and the Playstation 3 is huge.
For the Wii, the annual cost of leaving it on is negligible (which makes me feel better, as I’m always forgetting to switch ours off), whilst for the PS3 the cost is as much as $134, about £70, all things being equal. Of course, this probably sounds minimal, as it requires you to leave the console on for 24 hours a day, but add this together with the other always-on electrical items in your home and the cost starts to add up.
Take a look around your home and work out how you could save money by switching off electrical items. The kitchen is a good place to start – we’ve got at least 3 items in there (including our microwave and cooker) which could be switched off each night as the only reason to leave them switched on is for their digital clocks, which we never use. Moving on to the lounge, again you’re bound to find a couple of things that can be turned off – in our case we’ve got the TV, Wii, DVD player and Sky box which, from time to time, all get left on overnight or during the day when we’re not there.
As I said earlier, they might only cost a few pence to run each day, but add up the cost and you’ll soon see it’s worth it.
photo credit: włodi
I dread to think what standby modes run up to… for the past year or so I’ve tried to keep everything that can be switched ‘off’ on separate circuits, and to get into the habit of using the mains plugs.
Of course, games consoles themselves aren’t cheap, but they’ve come down hugely in price in real terms. I remember spending £70 on Zelda for the N64 in 1997, when £70 really was £70. ;_)
I know it’s cheeky to paste URLs into comments, but this is very topical – I’ve just written today about how you can learn about investment from Fable II on the Xbox 360.
http://monevator.com/2008/11/28/learn-how-to-get-rich-from-a-video-game/
Feel free to have a read and follow up with your own thoughts in a post! :)