Has anyone noticed that the Wii tends to run VERY warm if left on "yellow standby"?
It's alarming to the point that a very very small proportion of Wii'ers have had problems with their graphics chips overheating, resulting in a return and replacement by Nintendo
.
For those who are not sure what I'm talking about, there are 3 states of play in the Wii settings and three possible colours for the power LED:
Wii is switched on. Internet connection may or may not be on/off =
GREEN
Wii is powered down, but internet connection is active =
YELLOW
Wii is powered down, and internet connection is off =
RED
or, put it another way, in the system setup screens of the Wii:
Internet Connect 24 is
off = Wii has a
GREEN light when on, but no internet; Wii has a
RED light when off, and no internet.
Internet Connect 24 is
on AND standby connect is
off = Wii has a
GREEN light when on, and also has internet; Wii has a
RED light when off, and no internet.
Internet Connect 24 is
on AND standby connect is
on = Wii has a
GREEN light when on, and also has internet; Wii has a
YELLOW light when off, and internet is still connected.
(ie, the standby connect setting
only has an effect if WC24 is switched on in the first place).
Confused yet
?
After reading the horror stories, I decided to turn the "Standby Connection" feature off. It also means that the Wii wouldn't be getting updates "behind the scenes", but the benefit would be that it would not heat up during non-use.
As the Wii therefore runs hot or cold depending on the settings, it must mean that this has 'power' implications and it got me thinking about how much power the Wii draws in each of its modes...so I did a little test...and here are the results.
So, when the LED is
RED (ie Wii on standby), its drawing about 1W of power.
If you then put it into
YELLOW (ie standby but internet active) it draws
10x as much power at 10W
When its
GREEN (switched on), it draws 18-22W...it peaks at 22W when it boots, but not when its accesses a game (where it's stable at 18W)...so a nice round figure would be 20W (I work with simple numbers
)
So, unsurprisingly, it consumes 20x as much power in
GREEN as opposed to
RED modes. However, the surprising figure is that in
YELLOW mode (supposedly a different form of standby) it's still drawing 10x as much power as it would if it were in RED mode.
What does this mean in practice?
In monetary terms, if we use the following assumption:
Using 1000W for 1hr consumes 1kWh which costs about 10p
then, 10W for 10hr works out at 1p
So in
RED led state, it costs 1p to run for 100hrs, which equates to about 88p per year.
In
YELLOW led state, it costs 10p every 100hrs, which equates to £8.80 per year.
In
GREEN led state, it costs 20p every 100hrs, which equates to £17.60 per year.
If on average you play for one hour a day, and leave the Wii on
YELLOW at other times, you'll be paying £9.17 per year....so about a tenner.
If you do the same amount of gaming, but instead leave the Wii on
RED standby when not in use, it's only £1.57 per year.
calculation = {1/24th of 17.60 [play 1hr per day]}+{23/24th of either £8.80 or 88p [rest of the time on standby]}
According to VGchartz, about 6.57 million Wii's have been sold to date....giving a total cost (based on the above play time) of 60.2 million squid consumed worldwide when using the
YELLOW mode, as opposed to (if you do the maths) only 10.3 million squid if everyone left theirs on
RED....
....makes you think how much could be saved (by everyone together) if we switched off our electronic equipment properly (and that goes for other non-Wii stuff too
)...
Power Consumption figures for the Wii
Anyway, I dont see the point in leaving your wii on standby mode anyway, and at the moment still dont understand the point of wiiconnect24.
)
This is one of the reasons its on 24/7.
Linear Mode
