When I started playing Xbox One on a regular basis, I noticed something odd not long after. When I shut off the Xbox One, it wasn't quite as shut off as I thought it was. I found out what the issue was not long after, but at the time, it was still an unexpected point, and one that some believe might be a larger problem.

I plug most of my home theater gear--including my gaming hardware--into a combination of a Belkin Conserve Insight Electric Monitor and a Belkin Conserve power strip before it reaches the wall socket, so I can tell at a glance just how much juice the gear is pulling at any time. One night when I was shutting things down, I heard an odd whirring sound coming from the Xbox One, and I discovered that the Insight was still showing about 15 watts or so of power use. That strikes me as strange--as far as I knew at the time, when you shut a device off it should be off and not pulling juice--and that was when a quick Web search talked about the Default Mode, which allows the system to do things like continue downloads and the like overnight.

A good idea, kind of--particularly for those who don't have the fastest Internet speeds but still want access to the big files--but also kind of a pain. This system was going to keep pulling the equivalent of an LED light bulb over night, and that could have been a hefty slug in the wallet later on.

I later got to figuring and read a few other figures and discovered that the extra power consumed would amount to somewhere around $20 a year. That's not exactly the big slug to the wallet that I thought it would be, but it's still a punch I'd rather not take. So, using the combined powers of the monitor and the power strip, I just shut the power off to the Xbox One's outlet at night, and suddenly, power use dropped to the spectacularly low level of one half of a watt.

That was a pretty good drop, and there are plenty of nights that go by where I wake up and discover I've forgotten to hit the big off button, but I got to thinking; was it really all that bad? There are some, like the Natural Resources Defense Council, who suggest that the Default Mode is a waste, and that the standby mechanisms are poorly designed. And indeed, in an aggregate sense, that $20 a year can add up, especially given the number of Xbox One units that have already shipped. The NRDC actually suggests that that could reach somewhere around $250 million annually, which seems a bit suspect, but given the number of devices and the differences in electric rates, it's a possibility.

But even that is a question as well. There's a setting in the setting menu that allows for a switch to power saving mode. This takes the "Xbox On" functionality out of things if you have a Kinect, and no downloads will take place in standby mode, be they games or system downloads. It's not exactly simple to find, but it's there. That or you could just carry on with the universal expedient: unplug the system at night.

Sure, it's inconvenient to do things like that, and no one should have to have a combination of power strips and meters to have a full handle on how much power a device is burning when it should be shut off. Still though, there are ways around this, and should be explored accordingly. No one really wants to waste power, but there are some fairly simple things to do to prevent waste with the Xbox One. It would be better if it weren't quite so well-hidden, but hopefully just learning about things like this will help some people out.