How much power does my box use

[45RPM]

Recently upgraded V6 to 360.

Can someone tell me how much power is used when in the three standby modes; ie fast start vs  active start vs eco start.  Additionally, the same question when it is not in sleep mode(s).

With energy bills going up and to help the environment we (customers) need to have this info.

Thank you in advance.

[Andrew-G · Accepted solution]

You'll get no useful answer out of VM, luckily forum member g0hjq has done the hard work for you and measured it.

In terms of how much that is costing, if you leave a 360 on all the time, then Fast Start at 12 watts will (at 34p/kWh) cost £36 a year to run.  Active standby will cost £3.90 a year, and Eco will cost 90p a year.  Seems to me like Active Standby is the sweet spot between cost, energy use and performance, but the choice is down to each individual customer.

Worth knowing that the hub itself uses about 12 W all the time.  If you put it on a timer switch and turn it off for say seven hours over night that'll save ten quid a year - with a digital timer costing about seven quid, that's a better return you'll get on any investment short of a successful bank heist.  There's no technical downsides to turning the hub off in this way, but it relies on you have sufficiently fixed waking hours to make this work, and because the hub takes around 7 minutes to start from cold, you need to judge the morning start time to allow for that (and plan ahead if you need to have TV or internet needs that occasionally stray beyond your normal evening off time).  If your landline phone is connected to the hub that's something else to consider before planning on having the hub switched off overnight.

[45RPM]

Thank you Andrew for your thorough reply; very useful info. Sorry for my slow reply, had a few techi issue.

I'll jump onto the other thread and say thanks to g0hjq.

[nodrogd]

If you turn your TV boxes off overnight they will have to “catch up” on all the overnight updates that are pushed out, so could take a while to be useable. Another undesirable issue could be caused if you leave the boxes on, but decide to turn your hub off. If VM pushes out a new NIT (Network Ident Table) via the hub & makes synchronous changes to the broadcast muxes, your box will “lose” those channels until the new NIT is loaded. The only way to force an NIT download is then to reboot the TV box.

[GuyMal]

Thanks, that's really useful info.

[jk1990]

Sonos, TVs, Windows laptops (with sale on lan / wlan), iPhone iCloud backups, iPhone software updates, Alexa, Google Home, my printer all perform updates and/or backups overnight.

Many devices will apply the updates if they can’t apply overnight, but in general the device will wait until the following night. Some devices will after say 2 weeks or a month force the update in the day, others just won’t perform the function. 

In the case of an iPhone it will never backup to iCloud, at all, it’ll just start telling the user it’s not been backed up in x days. 

Even if you get the update late, given the amount of security updates (we have had 100 security updates for windows on some of these patching dates recently) you are running insecure, much more easily hackable equipment whilst you wait. 

As a person in cyber security, please don’t get a timer and turn your router off overnight. That £3 isn’t worth it.