The good folks at Retrevo, a leading electronics review website, recently surveyed over 400 visitors to their site on personal game console use.  The survey group varied in gender, age, income and location in the United States.  Retrevo was gracious enough to share their results with us.

Some findings:

• Retrevo Asked: Do you turn your game console off when you’re not using it?  84% said, “Most of the time.” 16% said, “Almost never.”
• Retrevo Asked:  Does your game console turn off automatically or go into sleep mode when it’s not in use? 29% said, “Yes.” 25% said, “No.” 46% didn’t know.
• Of the people who know their game console turns off or goes to sleep when not in use: 36% say it’s always done that. 18% enabled it to do that.

More on console energy consumption from Retrevo’s blog: 

Microsoft’s Xbox 360 and Sony’s PlayStation 3 have powerful graphics engines with millions of transistors running at super fast clock cycles.  Unfortunately, they both suck down large amounts of power.  The Nintendo Wii, on the other hand, uses a mere 19 watts of power but according to Greenpeace is manufactured with many environmentally questionable materials.  The good news is that both Sony and Microsoft now offer auto-power down modes on their consoles to help save energy.  The bad news is that consoles come with auto-power saving mode disabled and as if that wasn’t bad enough, almost half the console owners in a recent Retrevo Gadgetology study said they don’t know if it is on or off.

The Retrevo Gadgetology study asked game console owners how diligent they are about shutting down their consoles when they are not using them and whether or not the power saving mode was enabled.  We were pleased to see how many console owners indicated that they don’t leave their units powered on when not in use but were disappointed by the number of consoles that may not have the auto-power saving mode enabled.  In other words, console manufacturers have not done a very good job of implementing their power saving modes but fortunately many console owners have taken it upon themselves to turn their consoles off when not in use.

Although both Sony and Microsoft now offer auto-power down modes on their consoles, they are both disabled by default and even when the Xbox 360 has it on, it only offers one option of a 6 hour time out period before powering down the unit.  The Nintendo Wii has an auto power down mode that is only enabled when the WiFi  Connect24  mode is not enabled. Unfortunately, a lot of game consoles are still left powered on when not in use.

image credit: retrevo