Contemplating a new SB setup with some existing powered speakers,
tonight I broke out the Kill-a-watt power meter. I wanted to see how
much power the speakers use in their automatic "standby" mode, to
determine if I should hook them up to an X-10 module and use
BottleRocket to control their power.
While I was at it, I decided to measure the power usage of my
Squeezebox2 (which should be the same as a Squeezebox3). Caveat: the
kill-a-watt display rounds to the nearest watt, so it's not great for
measuring very small changes for low-draw devices like the Squeezebox.
The lowest power draw was attained by having the Squeezebox idle ("on"
or "off", as long as it's not playing an audio stream) with the
brightness set so the display was completely dark. This took 4 watts
(US adapter, ~120v AC power, and yes, watts, not volt-amps). I tried
disabling the wireless bridging and having the audio outputs disabled
when the Squeezebox was "off", but it still pulled 4 watts when idle
and dark.
Playing a stream with the display on and the visualizer active (the Now
Playing screen, or any screen where the visualizer displayed on the
right side or behind the text) pulled 6 watts.
Playing a stream with a static display (no visualizer), or the display
dark used 5 watts. So did having a static display (no visualizer) with
the player idle (off or on with no stream playing).
I didn't see any difference in power usage with the display set at
different brightness levels -- any light emission led to a 5 watt
demand, and any visualizer use during led to a 6 watt demand during
playback.
Among other things, this suggests to me that if you want to save energy
with something like PowerSave (http://ultratrendy.com:31888/slim/), you
should be sure that you have the display set to be dark when "off".
-Peter
--
peterw
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