I just discovered that an SD card will prevent the Nova from going to sleep in the same way as a USB drive.
My Nova measures around 23W in stand-by, and is always warm when I turn it on in the morning. And no clicks when putting it to sleep. I pulled out the SD-card that I once put in for a test (and never used since) and immediately network sleep mode is working as expected.
Together with switching from a 52W computer server to a 2W raspberry pi and turning off an infrequently used Bluesound Vault of 7W that’s a saving of almost 2kW per day, or close to €600 per year at the current prices.
If you attach any storage or enable server mode the streamers do, as you have discovered, keep their main power supply alive. This is so that the contents are discoverable, otherwise there would be a delay every time you turned the unit on while the drive was rescanned, and so that the built in server remains discoverable if used. This is a design choice which some will prefer, and others will not, especially in light of recent hikes in electricity costs.
To avoid this the options are to remove storage when shutting down, or to use Deep Sleep mode instead of Network Standby.
Nothing anywhere near €0.82 per kwh, though no info on up to date cost. Oddly the UK is missing from the chart, even though other non-EU countries like Turkey are included.
After reading this I checked my Nova and NDX2 and they were both set to server mode when I use a Uniti Core - duh! I’ve always wondered why the Nova was always warm…… We will see what tomorrow brings, I should pay more attention. Maybe there was a post saying leaving server mode enabled for better sound quality and I swallowed the cool-aide.
Indeed, as I noted (it is only first half of 2022). However, my understanding is that they have taken subsidies into account, and there was a note saying that Netherlands was very low because of having the largest subsidy. If you were to add the negative bar on top it cones to about €0.50
Solar power and batteries? OMG! Imagine! A whole new “Category” will be needed on this forum to discuss the variations in SQ associated with electricity produced from each brand of solar panels and batteries and a whole new budget will need to be found to pay for the associated snake oil products that will be invented to enhance the trail of getting electrical energy from photons to introducing that electricity to the PS… which solar panels make the music ‘darker’ or which batteries improve the timing, and other such subjective imperceivable-in-blind-tests none sense!!
Yes,but these subsidies are fixed. Independent of what you consume.Taxes now consist of VAT, energy taxes €0.04/kWh and an extra tax for the transition to renewable energy,€0.03/kWh.
Rebate is €2 per day,independent of what you actually consume.
If you want to make simple things complicated,leave it to us Dutch!
Believe me, there have been and are still discussions going on about this, but by and large, the general consensus is that they don’t appear to affect SQ. Which is a little hard to believe when you think of the relative low effort/cost gone into designing the Inverter which converts DC to AC. However I hear no difference.
Of course there may be variations in SQ depending on the cloud formation types blocking the sun, but I’ve never tested them all
The thing about Naim power supplies is that they draw energy near the maximum AC rectified voltage. The bigger they are the nearer. It’s only in this period when the capacitors charge that the noise on the mains can affect the DC output. The DC side is very stable particularly with DR.
In their own way they do a pretty good job of polluting the mains environment.
On the cost, on October 30 the prices on my contract were raised: €0,93943 per kWh during daytime, €0,71301 per kWh during night time. This is in The Netherlands, and the prices differ per energy company.
Per January 1st of next year the government puts a cap at €0,40 per kWh, with a limit of 2900kWh per year. And during November / December of this year we get €190 back per month. So in a sense I’m lucky that the prices were only raised by end of October.
I can remember people advising this path, since the main transformer will be always on and the unit does not have to warm up after being powered-on or waking from network-connected standby. (In which cases the transformer and other electronics will be “cold”.)
So, enabling server mode is a way to bypass EU standby regulations - though I always wondered, what a “server mode” achieves, if you have not connected any device to serve media from. (Though I may not have caught all use cases, like a box relaying internet radio or streaming services via multi-room.)
Server mode turns on a built in UPnP server that makes music on a USB drive accessible to other UPnP client devices. It also keeps the main power supply alive regardless of whether or not a drive is attached.
Multiroom is entirely different and doesn’t require the server to be running.
