Which components to switch off?

Yes I’m aware of power factors with most of LED lamps I have, also the effect of dimmers. It’s something I check, when the info is available, maybe why I’ve tended to select the more established/well known brands.

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Watts are a power rating but you pay for the energy, which is power over time.

If the device uses 10 watts, multiply by the hours it is turned on, to get the watt-hours, Wh. This is the energy it uses over this time. In this example, if the 10 watts unit is on for 24 hours, it uses 240 Wh.

Hence, a 10 watts device over 24 hours uses the same amount of energy as a 20 watts device over 12 hours.

Divide the Wh by 1000 to get kilo-Wh or kWh, which is what the power company bills you for.

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If you really want to turn off something, just turn off the 250.
Hopefully that will keep the other half happy and will quickly warm up again.

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Excellent. Thanks

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All the current streamers and Unitis do this, but my understanding is that only parts that are required to keep them discoverable are powered up, i.e. Ethernet, WiFi, and Zigbee. So maintaining discoverability rather than ‘optimum performance’, for which you could use a workaround such as enabling server mode to keep the main PSU running.

This is indeed what Steve explained here as well (and in another one a few posts down from there to clarify my questions)

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I switch off everything when not in use, when out or at nights.

Done so the last two decades as opposite to the 90’s when the green logos were on 24/7.

Perfectly fine with me.

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I tend to follow manufacturer’s recommendations. Naim says leave on/in standby for best performance, so I do. Auralic, too — it’s to do with the streamer clock needing to be warm to operate optimally. But ATC reckon the amp packs on their active speakers take at most half an hour to warm up, so these get switched off after use.

Roger

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Thanks for all the interesting responses, certainly food for thought in todays climate. I’m inclined to power down all but preamp and streamer for now. Thanks, this is such a great forum!

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I am sure when I visited Naim, and had, with several of us here, a presentation about the design improvements in the then new streamers (I think you might have been there Chris?) it was stated the standby power supply kept certain components optimised for sonic performance such as the clock rather than simply keeping the np800 card powered… but it was a few years back, and we did not get a copy of the presentation… so could well be wrong, perhaps Naim could confirm at some point.
(I am not going to take the lid of my ndx2 to poke around. :grinning:)

Hi Simon (& Chris), I agree, as I recall the Naim presentation on the SMPS standby function it was to keep the components/circuits powered up that were affected by power cycling & establish optimum SQ quickly at full system power up. I don’t recall items being listed other than the clock circuit.
(I just checked the mug shots & Chris did not go to that Naim meeting)

Its surprising how high Naim streamers power consumption is when idle, my NDX is always slightly warm.
Since this latest drive on reducing power costs, I’ve started powering off my NDX (XPS) when I know I won’t be using it for a few days. I’ve not gone into cost/watt measurements, but the Smart Meter £ reading first thing in the morning tends to show a slightly lower number.

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Hi Simon, I don’t recall any discussion of standby power being used for keeping key components powered up for sound quality purposes, but you could be right. Not sure how much the meagre 2W power available would achieve here. Perhaps @Stevesky would know as he has commented here before regarding network standby power use.

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As per the Steve post I linked above, he already confirmed there that wake-up from standby adds a warm-up time until everything is at its best, which can be avoided by server mode

Yes, that’s been mentioned repeatedly but it doesn’t address the possibility of network standby mode keeping anything warmed up for performance purposes.

True, it does not say if anything stays warmed up, but it does say that after standby some warm-up is required for best performance, so clearly not everything relevant is kept warmed up by the SMPS.

And he clearly wrote that if one wants immediate best performance, don’t use standby or enable server mode - which for all practical purposes seems sufficient information.

Just thinking that Steve probably has better things to do than confirming every tiny detail over and over again :slightly_smiling_face:

I use a Nait XS2 [2016] which according to Naim idles at about 16 watts, “biased to operate in quasi-complementary class-B.” Also, Naim says somewhere that “a class-AB amplifier draws twice the power that it delivers”. I doubt I could save much money turning the XS2 off: idling at 16 watts is not much on the electric bill. I do power off and unplug if there is a storm. A damaging power surge can occur from a local lightning strike, or from a wind storm knocking down power lines and transformers.

I might be being a bit slow here, but do Naim publish a comprehensive list of power consumption of their various components? I have searched the user manuals and the only reference I have found is for my NAP250 in volt/amps which (if I understand correctly) is pretty unless you know the power factor. Just about every other electrical item I have in the house seems to give me a clear wattage so I can work out the kWh and cost of running.
Some forum members have of course been very helpful and given their measured power consumptions (a big thank you!!) but it isnt an offical Naim figure and not every product is listed. So, help please!!
Once I know my running costs I can then assess whether I wish to switch off to save money or run the (possible) risk of equipment failure and sound degradation due to constance switching.

For some (streamers mostly, IIRC) it is in the specifications section of the product page on the website, for others (amps) it’s in the manual IIRC.

Where VA is given for idle power use it means volt * ampere, not volt/ampere, and you can treat it like watt. Wikipedia page for “watt”:

In terms of electromagnetism, one watt is the rate at which electrical work is performed when a current of one ampere (A) flows across an electrical potential difference of one volt (V), meaning the watt is equivalent to the volt-ampere (the latter unit, however, is used for a different quantity from the real power of an electrical circuit).

1 W = 1 V * 1 A

Where VA is given for transient power use, it is probably irrelevant for the power bill.

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Many thanks the source information, I will start to dig out the data. Also, thank you for the VA explanation - every day is a school day!!

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As this topic comes up over and over again, I looked up some numbers in the past, and others provided their measurements. See this post from me regarding e.g. the 300 manual, and in the same thread many other posts with measurements and detailed cost calculations: