In this paper, we study reliability properties of a k-out-of-n system with a single cold standby unit. We mainly focus on the case when the system operates in discrete time. In order to describe its aging behavior we consider three different mean residual life functions. By using some properties of order statistics we present several monotonicity results associated with these reliability characteristics. Since the calculation of the described quantities requires finding sums of infinite series, we provide a procedure to approximate them with an error not greater than a desired value. As an illustration we consider three special cases when the component lifetimes have geometric, negative binomial and discrete Weibull distributions.