Microsoft is getting ready to release its new energy-saving features for the Xbox Series X/S this week. The update includes the new Active Hours feature that Microsoft announced back in January. It will allow users to schedule what hours they use their Xbox Series X/S the most and boot up the console faster and do updates during those times.
During “non-active” hours, your Xbox Series X/S will then fully shut down in order to save energy during the times when you don’t use it as much.
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The update is quite a substantial step towards saving energy. In fact, the Active Hours mode on the console only draws 0.5W when it is fully shut down. It will then draw between 10-15W when it is in its Standby Mode.
So ideally, you would want to set up your Active Hours to be around the time you play games. This means the console will boot faster and perhaps update games while this mode is active.
The update also adds a new carbon-aware feature to the Xbox Series X/S. This will now remove the nightly maintenance updates from the console completely and replace them with a so-called “energy-aware” mode. The Xbox Series X/S will now be able to detect when the most renewable energy is available on your grid and only enter its maintenance mode for game updates during this time.
This feature is only available in supported regions. In South Africa, our grid barely has any wires so don’t expect it to feed data to your Xbox to tell it to update when there’s ample electricity available. Still, you should be able to make use of the new Active Hours feature and perhaps set this up to work around your loadshedding schedule.
In order to activate this mode, you’ll need to go into Settings – General – Power once your console has received its update this week.
The Xbox update also includes some other handy tweaks such as a refreshed Xbox search experience. You can read more about it here.
