Sign of the times… I’m considering powering down (off at the plug) my Sonos devices overnight to save some pennies. Would this be damaging to them at all? Connected devices sometimes don’t like having the plug pulled regularly. Any loss of settings, or wearing over time?
Thanks,
Matt
Best answer by Ralpfocus
View originalThe only loss of setting is for groups.
It isn't easy to say how the cost of reduced service life caused by power cycling will stack up against the savings in electricity by turning units off. What I do is to shut off those of my units that do not see daily use; the few that are used daily, are left on 24 hours.
Repeated power cycling often causes early failure, so IMHO it’s cheaper to leave them in standby than replace units when they fail.
Having said that, like @Kumar, I turn the rarely used ones off.
It is one of the reasons that Sonos does have a “low power mode” that it automatically enters after X minutes, to reduce the power footprint. But it’s not zero, either, as it is still listening for instructions from the network, so it can power back up and work as expected.
Crisis, what crisis? …The monthly home energy bill here in our modest three bedroom home is now more than the purchase price of a Sonos One each & every month …and the rumours going around the UK infer that our energy Bills will likely go up again by a further 50% in October - so that’s £300+ per month (approx). Alexa says that’s around $373.77 (US)
That said, I would still probably prefer to sit in a dark cold room with the TV off, eating salad, rather than switching off all my Sonos devices, which would probably only save me £50 (approx. in standby mode) per year anyway ha ha 
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You can find the idle power usage for sonos products here Sonos Power Consumption While Idle.
Which for a Sonos Beam, if I understand correctly how you to do the calculation, means that if it is idle overnight for a whole year its annual comsumption would be 6.3W * 8 hours (roughly) * 365 / 1000 = 18.4Kw which at current UK prices amounts to around £5.15. Which is not much of a saving if, and no-one can quantify this, it shortens the life of a product.
Idle is defined as audio muted or paused on all players in the household for at least 3 minutes, and no audio signal is being sent to a line-in connection or home theater player (in most cases, this means that the TV is off).
Which does imply that a device not being used during day, whilst another device is being used, will be consuming more than its idle value. Also for soundbars turning the TV off as opposed to standby should be considered, subject to the same issue of power cycling impact.
So, I suspect that the approach of turning off little used devices as suggested by
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Pick up a decent power meter and see just what your Sonos are costing you for power.
This one will report actual costs and project estimates for future periods.
http://www.p3international.com/products/p4460.html
I have a couple Play 3 that are rarely used, I put them on a switch to save the power cost but soon got tired of the monkey motion on updates and having to wait until they woke up and were ready to play. Found I was far less likely to use them with all of that and decided the minor cost was worth it.
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