As I understand it, the kind of amp inside the AmpliPi doesn’t consume much power sitting idle. However, what is “idle” in this case? Presumably, if the zone light is off (red speaker icon in the app) that would be idle. But what if the zone is on but the imput isn’t supplying anything?
I ask because I mainly use DLNA to supply music and it’s pretty annoying needing to turn two things on, in two different apps, to listen to something.
When all zones are muted, the amps go into standby mode and AmpliPi uses <10W. Most of that is just the Raspberry Pi. I’m measuring 9W right now with all zones muted. After turning on a zone I’m measuring 19W. Due to hardware limitations, if ANY zones are on ALL amps exit standby.
I mostly use Spotify so I have the same problem as you. I’d rather not have to open a second app to turn things on and off, but I’d also rather not waste that extra 10W of power when not playing things. I actually thought we had an issue on GitHub already but it turns out it’s kinda the opposite problem: Feature: Auto stop streaming source after ~1 min of all connected zones/groups being muted · Issue #107 · micro-nova/AmpliPi · GitHub
What we want here is an auto-mute zones after some period of time that the streaming source has been paused. I’ve added this as an issue here: Auto-mute zones connected to a source if nothing is playing · Issue #237 · micro-nova/AmpliPi · GitHub