What does a playstation / xbox (active) cost to run?

A games console like a PlayStation or Xbox draws around 150-200W while you are actively playing, more than a TV and less than a gaming PC, so a few hours of gaming an evening is a noticeable but not alarming cost. The console's real power-bill trap is not the gaming, though. It is what the console does the rest of the time.

Playing is the honest part of the equation. The graphics chip works hard to push a game, and that 150-200W over a few evening hours a week adds up to a modest, predictable line on the bill, roughly in the territory of a decent television. If that were the whole story, a console would barely rate a mention.

Modern consoles default to a 'rest' or 'instant-on' standby mode that keeps them partly awake to download updates and resume quickly, and that mode can draw 10-15W around the clock. So the console costs you for the 22 hours a day you are not playing, quietly running at a fridge-router sort of draw while it sits idle in the cabinet.

Stack those two facts together and the idle time can rival or beat the gaming for total energy over a year, because there is so much more of it. A couple of hours of play against twenty-two hours of standby, day after day, tilts the arithmetic in a way most people never suspect.

Switching to full power-off, or 'energy saving' standby, in the settings removes almost all of that, at the cost of a slightly longer start-up. The console shuts down properly between sessions instead of dozing, and you wait a handful of extra seconds to load in next time, which is a fair price for cutting most of the round-the-clock draw.

It is the single best saving on any console, a one-time flick through a settings menu that keeps paying off for as long as you own the machine. You can still let it wake on a schedule to grab updates if that matters to you. Pop your console into the calculator with a realistic mix of play hours and standby to see how much that setting is worth over a year.