One for the smart meter sceptics

On my PVR standby power is nearly the same as operational power. Consumption only goes down to <0.5W on deep standby

My PVR can come out of standby to operational in a second. It takes approx 45 seconds to go from deep standby to operational, including automatically waking up fro deep standby to perform a recording.

Don't most people now only use their TV as monitors if they have an under TV box?

Thats an intriqguing one, I wonder how many people are doing that

It's possibly becoming more popular with those with solar on the roof. During the Summer months use the energy captured during the middle of the day at evening/night. When solar is not producing much in the winter the same investment in storage can be used to charge during periods of cheap energy on the grid for use when the energy on the grid is expensive.

Currently, and for the next few years, it may be the golden period for such manipulation to be financially viable. When the majority of the population is charging their EVs and ASHP are possibly running for longer periods than a gas boiler there may not be so much of an off-peak period and less of a differential between peak and off-peak prices. The payback period for the up-front costs of a battery may become lengthy.

The economics of such an arrangement also depends on energy prices. This Labour Government claims the average UK bill will reduce by £1400, and by 2030, or on the other hand we may import some genetically engineered flying pigs from the USA.

Do you mean a streaming box? I have two PVRs, but don't really use the TV live.

May coincide timewise with loads of surplus, expensive to recyclem, first generation Ev batteries that are no longer suitable for traction purposes, ie less charge but same weight. The weight is no issue in a house, so multiple ex-Evs batteries makes sense for time shifting overnight lecky.

Combined with solar in our case.

Tim

If you are streaming from the net the aerial signal is not being used. If you using a PVR to watch recordings, live TV or as a streaming box then the PVR is on and any pass-through works.

Signal from an aerial can be split so signal pass-through from a PVR/box is not necessarily essential.

Satellite: Universal LNBs require one feed from the LNB for each tuner so no pass-through required. Unicable LNB signals can be split so again no pass-through required.

I'm suggesting that once you have a PVR/STB most people always will be using that as their "tuner" and don't require an aerial feed to their TV. If multiple boxes are connected to the same aerial or dish feed-through from one box to another may not be the best distribution method.

The splitter would have to be passive or there would continue to be standby consumption.

If reception is marginal the losses in the splitter could be a problem. I've heard there are "reactive" (as opposed to resistive) splitters that introduce less losses.

There are losses in both resistive and inductive splitters but in general use the latter as it's likely to be fully screened while most of the resistive types are very cheaply made without full screening. There isn't much difference in cost between the two types - you are only looking at a couple of quid for a two way splitter.

Something retrieved from the web archive I posted around 13 years ago

If we eat enough genetically engineered flying pigs, will we also be able to fly, even if it takes a generation or two?

I reckonn that by charging my EV during the overnight cheap rate, I probably saved about £1200 last year.

You can self identify as a bird and jump off a tall building already.

Cats do

I expect they listen to the BBC too.

Would your opinion change if you measured them ?

I have two systems, one idles at 100W, the other idles at 22W. Guess which one remains running...

Maybe I should do a measurement, and see how good I can do. If you reduce the memory to a single DIMM, that can still be enough for an OS, while saving a tiny bit of power.

A good system uses the iGPU inside the CPU. That's one of the ways you can save power, unplug the NVidia desktop card, just run off the iGPU for graphics.

Paul

The RAM doesnt use much power at all.

CPU and GPU are the ones.

With the CPU the less the transistor size and the lower the clock speed the cooler it will run. Going to a core I5 from a clunky old celeron saved a lot.

Dumping a separate graphics card also helps a lot

An intel based server should be able to drop down to 25-30W at idle if you buy the right components

ARM based machines can use a bit less, but the performance will suffer

I got my systems down to 20 watts or so years ago. My current desktop system (I5, 2TB disk drive, 16GB memory) idles at about 5 watts.

Much less than that nowadays.