How Much Energy Does My Xbox 360 Consume?
Anyone who has seem the Xbox 360 power brick knows that the thing sucks a lot of power out of the wall. The thing practically has its own ZIP code. I wanted to know, in practical terms, how much the hours playing Battle for Middle Earth II and Viva Piñata were costing me.
I dug up some video game console power usage estimates and used the Xbox 360 estimate of 165 W. Assuming I play for an average of three hours every night, we can estimate that I will use 180.675 kWh/year. My utilities company uses graduated pricing and a variable rate fuel surcharge, but we’ll use a convenient estimate of $0.10/kWh. This means that it will take about $18.07/year ($1.51/month) to play my Xbox 360.
But this is only half the story really. I have a 32-inch CRT HDTV. Digging up the values, from my owner’s manual, I see that it uses 180 W. At the same rate of 3 hours/day of gaming, we can estimate that my TV will use 197.1 kWh/year, which figures up to about $19.71/year ($1.64/month).
Aren’t CRTs big energy hogs though? Could I lower the amount by switching to an LCD or Plasma? I took a look at a couple of Samsung HDTVs and ran some numbers. The plasmas I looked at were all in the 400-500 W range, so I chose a convenient TD with a 450 W usage. This figures up to 492.75 kWh/year and a cost of $49.28/year just to play Xbox for 3 hours/day. An LCD HDTV with the same 32-inch size as my CRT would be a little less. The Samsung LN-S3251D uses 165 W leading to the exact same values as the Xbox 360 itself—180.675 kWh/year and $18.07/year. However, a 40-inch LCD HDTV (Samsung LN-S4051D) uses more power at 218 W. This yields a yearly usage of 238.71 kWh/year and an annual cost of $23.87/year.
To give these numbers a bit of persecptive, though, consider these figures. An electric oven pulls down about 5000 W. A clothes dryer sucks up 5000 W. A 2.5-ton central AC unit burns 3500 W.
Technorati Tags: Xbox 360, Energy, Power, Electricity