If it is not powering anything at the time, I turn mine off at the front panel. At idle it uses essentially no power.
I leave mine on 24/7. Looks like you’re good as well and the process you went through is perfect! Enjoy.
All working well. I got globalnet powerplay web page up and running and at idle, I am using about 80W. I do leave my mac mini on all the time, so the rest must be due to standby power and then what the P3 is using itself. Love the ability to see some volts, watts and THD remotely. Geeky and cool information! The top of my voltage graph is being cut off for some reason though.
With regards to the on/off settings of the outlets, how are you guys using those? My gear is mostly powered on/off by a solenoid switch, so its not like I can push or switch a power button on my gear and then power it on and off through the outlets.
According to Apple, the Mini uses up to 85 watts.
I programed my unit to turn on the source and preamp immediately, with a delay before turning on the amp. Shut down is the reverse. This avoids any turn-on surges/clicks from the source and Pre from being amplified and sent to the speakers.
I understand the reason in wanting to have a delay, or staggered on/off, but you must have hard on/off switches on your gear to be able to do that? My gear is soft power toggle, so it does not stay in an “on” position if I turn the power off at the P3. So, as far as I know, I have no way of using the P3 the way you do in having a staggered startup and shut down of your gear.
Yeah, the mini does suck a surprizing amount of juice.
Yes, all of my equipment has hard switches. Some even have multiple (like tubes amps with separate standby and operate switches where I need to throw switch in addition to the Power Plant programming.
For soft switched gear I would just leave the Power Plant on and those circuits powered. It is unfortunate you can not take advantage of the programming on/off feature as I find it quite nice.
Of course, there is also the camp that prefers to leave everything on all the time. This is certainly an option, at least for solid state gear.
I’ll just do what I’m doing now and leave the P3 on and use my Harmony remote to stagger my on cycle.
Sounds like a perfect plan.