Actually you don’t need to buy the little device to measure current draw. Granted, it will give you averages but a simple calculation will suffice.
Lets say your plasma draws 270W and you watch for 4 hours per day. 270x4 =1,080 or 1.08kWh. Then take that 1.08 and multiply at by your kWh charge, which ranges from 7 cents in heavily subsidized (the south) and 14 cents in less subsidized (the northeast). In my case that box would cost me 15 cents a day or $4.53 a month.
Getting rid of my desktop computer and going with a laptop made a big difference. The desktop sucked 600W x 24hrs, for 14.4kWh a day, or $2.02 per day, or $60.48 per month.
The laptop which is plugged in all day is all of 95W x 24hrs or 28 cents a day, $8.40 a month for a machine which is just as capable if not more so.
There are people who actually worry about $200 / a year? That own a computer? That buys software and high speed internet connections? You cannot be serious.
If you cannot afford the $200 to leave your computers on, then you will not be able to afford the computer, internet connection and software that you will need to operate the computer in the first place.
A better tip for you would be to sell your computer cancel your internet connection and you might as well cancel your cable TV too and sell your LCD or Plasma.
Jeff,
You need to divide by 1000 not by 100 when figuring your electricity cost. Your numbers are skewed. I pay .06c KWH so it cost very little to run my pcs for a year. However, it still a good idea to put the hard drives to sleep when idle.
It all depends on the “computer experts” you ask.
Some come from the old school and fear the startup of hard drives -
“Starting a hard drive is like starting a cold enigne in the winter”.
Others will tell you that it is perfectly fine to shut down a compute once or twice a day.
Just do not do it incessently and cause strain on the computer power supply.
It all depends on the computer expert you ask .
http://www.mini-box.com has a PSU that claims 96% efficiency also there are perfectly good main boards that can use 20W http://www.via.com.tw so if you design your home theater/server with the appropriate parts you can cut your power usage even further. My other suggestion would be to use your home theatre PC as your server, consolidation is an easy way to cut your power usage by a factor of 2.
A previous poster already suggested most of these things
Someone should add up all the extra kWH that the folders are using up and then make a determination if their contribution to cancer/seti/etc is really worth all those tons of carbon in the atmosphere
600W for a desktop? Whats the CPU? I’ve got a bunch of older computer running various things. Here’s some readings I’ve taken.
smoothwall on a PII 400 43W -HD spun down
NASlite on a P 200 36W -HD spun down
Geexbox PII 400 62w -HD running 32 HD spundown
HAM Radio apps P 200 34W HD running
Thats not counting 1 monitor on a KVM switch.
think about how much energy is burned running MRI’s and CATscans and performing surgery and making synthetic drugs (often from petroleum) and transporting patients to and from hospitals and clinics.
an MRI machine uses kilowatts of electricity for each scan. the coils have to be cooled with liquid helium - typically about 1700 liters of liquid helium. guess how much electricity it takes to keep that in a liquid state? huge amounts.
i don’t think there’s any question that working for a cure of cancer, alzheimers, BSE, etc, makes good environmental sense.
BTW, that $600k price tag is a HOUSE in the WORST Area. Take a $25,000 house in the midwest, that is what 600k will ALMOST BUY YOU OUT HERE.
About $2-3mill will buy you a decent, (just decent) house in a safe neighborhood in california, such as in Santa Clara. But it will still be a smaller house.
But you do get paid better out here, and the cost of living really isn’t that much more, except housing, and insurance. Living in the valley on 140k a year, after 5 years you should be pulling in $200k a year if you invested in something on the side, which most people do.
If you live in a warm climate, the problem is even worse. Every watt of power consumed by your computing gear is turned directly into heat–heat which must be extracted from your home by your central air conditioner. Considering the typical efficiencies of A/C systems in moving heat from the inside to the outside of your home, you may well be paying more for A/C power to extract computer heat than you pay for the computer power in the first place.
Kalid, your labeling is wrong at http://tinyurl.com/2jb45v
You give .1428 cents, it would be clearer to either be $.1428 or
14.28 cents per KWH. Without looking more closely I orginally entered what I pay 9 cents per KWH and was coming up with $2000 per year, “no way I thought”
Putting the hard drives to sleep is a bad idea. They’re mechancial things, and having them power up and down over and over is definitely not going to be good for them. If you’re really running a server, they’re probably going to have to come on line pretty regularly if for nothing more than to just write entries in log files, etc.
Unfortunately we’re in an age where the online capacity of hard drives has outpaced any feasible off-line storage medium. I’ve got a 2TB media drive, which is raid 6 of a bunch of (250GB) external usb drives. Of course it runs a bit slow, but I’m not looking for crazy bandwith, just a lot of space and redundancy. I have no way of backing this up, besidess buying another server and set of drives somewhere else and syncing the two, and leaving that online continuously. It’s not even possible to buy another set of drives, store data on them, and then unplug them and leave them lying around; hard drives are notorioiusly bad at long-term storage when powered off.
I will say that my local server used to run mail/web/dns and anything else I felt like providing at the time. I moved these things to a virtual server, and it has been great. I don’t have to worry when the power goes out here, that I’m missing mail. When I move places, I can disconnect my server and leave it off, to be reconnected at my leisure for when I want music, bittorrent downloads, etc… rather than having to make it’s downtime as short as possible. I can also pay a lot less a month for a shitty consumer connection from verizon or comcast, rather than having to go with someone like speakeasy so I get nice static IPs and unblocked ports.
And I’ll just offer the tip out there - I believe heat is the #1 killer of hard drives. I’ve got another 4 disk array that is server’s root. The thing ran fine for several years. Then one of the drives died. It turns out that the case fan that was blowing on that drive in particular had died. Go figure.
I’m surprised that no one has mentioned virtualization. I had a setup with 5 servers, mostly P4 based and I consolidated them down to a single Pentium D 950 box (this was early 2006) running VMware on Linux and my P4 storage server. My power bill dropped at least $50/month.
My next step will be to replace the P-D with a quadcore Core 2 CPU and replace the storage server with a SAS JBOD box attached to the VMWare server. One server, one CPU, and far less HDs, fans, and other stuff to draw power.
