Sonos needs to tackle idle energy consumption of existing devices with a software update and an "Eco" mode

The new Era speakers show Sonos’ commitment to limiting environmental impact, while not limiting the use case.

The speakers are doing something when they are not being used: they are ready for starting up asap, keeping a connection to your wifi and other speakers. I'm not sure the Eco-mode you are proposing is technically possible on older speakers. I for one would not even use it if it would mean my speakers needed more start up time.

The idle energy consumption of Sonos devices is not a secret. Why did you buy them in spite of this?  

I use smart plugs. Mainly for convenience, but also to power off high usage standby devices like TVs overnight. If I wanted I could add Sonos to this setup, or indeed just switch off manually if desired. But then I would lose convenience of instant music. It’s a trade off. With TVs smart plugs pay for themselves in a year; I’m not sure how long it would take for speakers. Certainly longer.

Minimal - that’s the point. Break even time around 1 year for TV.

I live in the UK and had my LG on eco mode. It was consuming around £25-£30 p.a, including 1-2 hours viewing per day.

I use Hive radiator valves and smart plugs. The Hive website says they cost 40p p.a. to run, but with increased energy costs here that is now around £1 per plug. They cost me around £20 each on offer last year, so for TVs have paid for themselves. I haven’t estimated Sonos use - but it would take longer to break even. Also, as I said above, the convenience of listening to music on a whim trumps potential savings!

It really comes down to you measuring your own devices, data-plate and claimed numbers aren’t always going to match what you actually see.

A smart TV can draw different levels of power, mine has two. It has cold start that draws a tiny amount as nothing but the remote receiver and a power switch are powered. A warm start, like Sonos keeps the computer chips alive but in a low power mode.

We tried putting our Christmas lights, small LED ones on a timer to save power. With the Kill-A-Watt meter telling the tale we used less power running the lights 24x7 than we did running the switch 24x7 and the lights 8 hours.

Meters, I have the Pe 4400 and 4460 with more features.

https://www.amazon.com/s?k=p3+kill-a-watt+meter&crid=25YIS25JP3H44&sprefix=p3+kill-a-watt+meter%2Caps%2C132&ref=nb_sb_noss_2

I’d say a guess based on the number of posts about powering on and something breaking.

Add in the general rule on electronics that the start-up surge is hard on them and thermal-cycling risk seen in all electronics.

Like many tech companies, Sonos knows it must do better when it comes to the climate and it has come to the conclusion that in order to make a significant impact on its carbon footprint, it will have to find ways to stop its family of wireless speakers and components from using so much electricity.

This realization is spelled out in the company’s first climate action plan, which it will use as a road map to achieve carbon neutrality by 2030 and then net zero by 2040. The plan joins Sonos’ first product sustainability program, which it also unveiled as part of its 2021 Listen Better Report, which provides an overview of its Environmental, Social, and Governance (ESG) efforts.Both the climate action plan and the product sustainability program are geared toward increasing the company’s product sustainability while decreasing its total contribution to global carbon emissions.“With our Climate Action Plan, we’re entering a new phase in our commitment to environmental responsibility,” Sonos CEO Patrick Spence said in a press release. “We are invigorated by the challenge to innovate and create better solutions for our customers and for the planet.”

The reason Sonos is now laser-focused on the question of power is that more than 75% of its carbon emissions can be attributed to the energy consumed during its products’ lifecycle. In other words, Sonos can make big improvements in its supply chain, the materials it uses, and its product packaging — all of which are under active review — but these won’t have as big an impact on its carbon bottom-line as figuring out ways to make its new and existing products more energy efficient.

It’s a problem that feels deceptively simple. Sonos says that in 2019, the average idle power consumption of its products (the power used when the speakers aren’t actually playing music) was 3.83 watts per hour. That seems like a small amount, but it’s a continuous, 24/7 drain that only stops when you unplug the product from the wall. Multiplied over all of the Sonos products out in the wild, and it’s easy to imagine a much, much bigger number for total energy consumed.

The goal, according to Sonos, is to design new products that replicate this energy efficiency while providing smaller efficiency gains to existing equipment using software updates. Ultimately, it expects to get to an average idle power consumption of less than 2 watts per hour — something it believes it can do with its portable speakers within 24 months.

At the same time, the company is looking at a variety of ways to make its new products more environmentally friendly from a materials point of view. By 2023 it says it will eliminate the use of virgin plastics, replacing them with post-consumer recycled (PCR) plastics. It will change the design of the products to replace adhesives with fasteners so that they can be easily disassembled and recycled when they reach the end of their useful lives, but also to make them easier to repair when they can be fixed.  By 2025, it aims to have packaging made with 100% responsibly sourced paper, and on the rare occasions when it needs to use plastic, it will use PCR plastics.All of these efforts are aimed at reducing what Sonos’s contributes to the carbon problem, which it calculated was 1,231,430 metric tons of carbon dioxide equivalent in 2020 (about the same as 267,528 passenger vehicles driven for one year). But since it’s essentially impossible for industrial activity to produce zero emissions, the other side of the climate coin is to buy carbon offsets through investments in specific environmental projects.

I'd applaud Sonos if they would make my existing speakers use less power without any change of functionality. I always cring when I read that “The reason Sonos is now laser-focused on the question of power is that more than 75% of its carbon emissions can be attributed to the energy consumed during its products’ lifecycle.” These are not Sonos’ emissions, but mine. My car's CO2 emissions are not Exxon's emissions.  Sonos might help by improving the energy usage of the products they sell, but in the end it's the client's emissions