RonBoyd
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Why You Never Need to Put Your Apple TV (or Other Modern Devices) to Sleep
It costs approximately $2 to leave a Chromecast plugged in twenty-four hours a day, three hundred sixty five days a year at the average U.S. energy price of 12.5 cents per kWh. If you unplug your Chromecast (or similar devices like the Amazon Fire TV Stick) when they aren’t in use (which is the only way to turn the power off on most streaming sticks) you’ll save less than a cup of coffee a year and you’ll be forever plugging and unplugging things to watch TV.
Sure, sure, you say. The Chromecast is so tiny! The bigger devices like the Apple TV and the Amazon Fire must consume way more power right? ...
So in practical cold-hard-cash terms, that means the if you leave the Apple TV on 24/7 it will consume about $2.25 worth of electricity (and if you ran the thing playing videos all day and night for a whole year you’d burn less than five bucks). In sleep mode and unplugged, obviously, you can reduce your power consumption to roughly 25 cents or nothing, respectively, for the time you’re not using the device over the course of the year. The Amazon Fire TV? Same story. It idles a bit higher at 5.1 watts but that still only translates to approximately $4.50 for a whole year.
You’ll save more energy per year replacing a single frequently used 60w incandescent light bulb with an LED bulb than you would unplugging your streaming box every night for a decade.