Kill A Watt P4400 Review – XBox 360 Power Usage

Caution: This post may involve some maths!

I’m going to show you how to figure out how much money an electronic device costs to run using a Kill A Watt P4400 power meter from P3 International and approximately how much power an XBox 360 uses.

While I was working on an energy audit checklist I was working on I came across this Efficiency Vermont page that claimed “A Microsoft Xbox ® 360 draws about 175 watts when in use and about 140 watts when idle.”

BALONEY! I said to myself. Well, we sell P3 Kill A Watt meters at our store on 7 Marble Ave, Burlington, Vermont and online here, so I ran down there and took one off the display and brought it home. You may ask, “But James, don’t you have one of your own?” Well, I did until I loaned it to my father and I’m not holding my breath on getting it back.

So here’s what I found out about the XBox 360 power usage.

Here are 2 pictures of the P4400.

Yep, that’s a Wall-E sticker on my laptop.

The 15amp rating is high enough for most of the electrical devices in your home.

First I plugged the P3 into the wall and plugged the XBox 360 into it with the power off, which got me about 1.6 Watts of power usage. This is obviously a lot lower than the 140Watts of idle efficiency Vermont claimed. So, I assume now they meant powered on, but not playing a game.

XBox 360 with the power off.

The XBox 360 has a big external power supply in the form of a power brick. So I unplugged the cord from the XBox 360 to see how much  power the disconnected power brick was using and that came out to .9Watts.

Almost a full watt of power usage just from this brick sitting there doing nothing! I’m guessing this is from the transformers and inductors in there creating electromagnetic fields.

When I turned on the XBox 360 and let it chill out at the main menu screen I got just about 100watts of power consumption.

Xbox 360 at “idle.”

When I booted up the game I got slightly more power consumption, but didn’t see anywhere close to 175watts. The highest I saw was about 140 watts, and it mostly stayed around 125watts in game play.

Xbox 360 in game.

Alright, so in the name of science my experiment took 34 Minutes. To get the time on the clock you just hit the pink button that says “Hour” on the Kill A Watt meter.

See 34 Minutes.

Then to get kWh (Kilowatt hours) you hit the pink button again.

So we used .06kWh in 34 minutes.

Great, so what does that mean!? Well, lets not get into CO2 usage, but look at the dollars and cents of it.

You’ll need a copy of your power bill.

We pay $.1326 per kWh above 100kWh, so I’m going to use that rate because reducing your energy consumption will save you that money first. We also pay $.00448 per kWh for energy efficiency programs. So power here costs $.13708 per kWh. We know that I spent .06kWh in 34 minutes. I’m not going to work this out exactly because it’s not worth it’ll just look more confusing but, there are 24/.5 hours = 48. 48 * .06kWh = 2.88kWh/day of power usage by playing around with your Xb0x which equals $.395/day. Which equals $144.10 per  year.

See how easy it is to use a Kill A Watt P4400, available here, and how much your XBox 360 can really cost you.

So, if you’re leaving your Xbox powered on all the time, turn it off.