Below is a chart of how much electricity the various components of my computer system use.

Are these reasonable numbers?

Normal mode of operation is at 198 watts.

tanstaafl.

Time to upgrade to something more modern and power efficient. 156W is way too much.

My MythTV system, with multiple tuners, five hard drives, and a fancy graphics card, doesn't hit that amount even when all of those items are "busy".

Edit: Normal steady state when watching 1080i video is about 85W, and there are far more power-efficient systems available now than when I assembled that one.

Cheers

Note: I chose to illustrate with the MythTV box because it is the most power-hungry of all of the sytems we have here.

My "daily" workhorse is a 17" notebook (34W in normal use, including the 1920x1200 display panel), and our 24/7 server is now an AMD Fusion board that idles at about 23W with two drives.

Everything else here is also under 50W in normal use.

Cheers

Wow - I'll need to look at my main system (which does have much lower power usage than the big servers and SGI boxen)

It isn't going to be anywhere near that low :-)

(what did you use to get power figures?)

I measure AC voltage and amperage at the wall socket, and just multiply them together to get watts. I understand that's not a perfect method for AC, but it's more than close enough for practical purposes.

For the MythTV box, I confess I haven't used that method recently. Instead, I'm relying upon the real-time wattage display on the UPS it is plugged into. Kinda fun to watch the displayed values change in response to system activity!

And the figure there includes some external devices (antenna pre-amps) that are also powered from the same UPS.

Cheers

Ahhh - don't think I can get that granular with my current setup. I get realtime figures for power to the house, so while I can see the impact (sort of) a particular device uses, I need to try and discount all the other devices in the house.

If I load up all CPU cores on most of these systems, the wattage figures do go up. But that's not the normal 95+% use case. So the figures I've quoted above don't reflect full 200% CPU loads.

The MythTV box has a Core2 Duo 2.6GHz CPU, my notebook has a Core2 Duo 2.4GHz CPU, and the AMD Fusion board is an E450 design at 1.65GHz.

They all have SpeedStep or Cool'n'Quiet enabled, and so normally are clocked lower than the max GHz ratings.

The Core2 systems are now at least two generations out-of-date, and I'd expect newer designs to be more power efficient than those.

Oh, and I did notice a 10-15W reduction on the MythTV system when I recently swapped in a Seasonic 80+-Gold rated supply in place of the Corsair PSU it had been using.

The "off" current also dropped to about 2-watts with the new PSU. Excellent results. Now I understand some of the value in expensive PSUs.

Most of our newer UPSes at work have this display. Really handy for balancing loads too. I need to check and see if there is an easy way to default the display to the wattage used, as after a power event they all revert to showing the voltage instead.

Around the house I use a kill-a-watt to check on various things. Though living back in Texas, the AC is back to leading my energy usage. In California, I did manage to keep my power usage down enough to stay in the first tier of billing. Eco and wallet friendly, handy they go together

I shifted all my desktop type activity over to the Core 2 Duo Mac Mini a while back. With the monitor, looks like I'm sitting at ~36 watts to be here on this page, with the typical iTunes and other pieces open in the background.

Well.... I could do that, but it would not be cost effective.

My house is split out on two meters: one for the computers (mine and SWMBO's) and one for all the rest of the house. The A/C is split evenly between the two meters, with one 110V leg of the 220 the A/C uses coming off of each meter.

Right now, after a full year of operation on the split metering, the house has used one kWh more than the computers. My most recent electric bill which covers a two month period, came to 200 pesos for each meter. (This was before the A/C was installed.) That works out to about eight dollars per month for my computers.

I should note that in addition to the computers, the second meter also has two telephone systems (one local, one VOIP), a cable modem, and a router. These draw 30 watts 24/7.

SWMBO's iMac uses far less power than my system; it is efficient, yes, but also far less powerful than mine. Let's say it uses 1/4 of the power of my system. That means my inefficient power-hungry system is costing me $6.00 per month to run. That's for computer, monitor, scanner, printer, everything. The computer itself is probably costing me about $5.00 per month.

So, if I could cut my power usage in half by spending $2,000 to build a really energy-efficient but powerful system, why the electric bill savings would pay for the new computer in just 33 66 years.

I'll get right on that.

tanstaafl.

Edited to correct math error.

Heck no, don't be foolish and buy new. There are lots of punters out there who upgrade to the latest and greatest every 2-3 years, so just grab their cast-offs for 1/10 the new cost.

The pay-off for your ultra-cheap electric bill may still be in the 2-3 year range, but you'll be doing the planet a favour too, as well as saving some (tiny) hidden costs on the air-conditioning bill as well.

Cheers

Depending on the age, it may actually be pretty close to the power of your machine, just without the expandability. I was quite impressed with the capabilities of the one I had at my last job. Handled running 2-3 OSes at the same time just fine, once I filled the 4 memory expansion slots.

The somewhat recent push for much more power efficient processors has been great to see. Intel is now focused on introducing their new tech first in their mobile processors, then desktop, then server. It used to be the other way around, with the server chips eventually being chopped down and hobbled to work in a laptop.


Hey now, some of us like new shiny things I do wish at times I could reclaim some of the cost of my machines, but they tend to turn into hand me downs for the family. My grandfather is running the Mini I bought in 2006, and my grandmother has the laptop from that year. My desktop was new in early 2008, and the current Mini is actually a tradeup. My last company needed an older Mac for QA testing, so I traded a late 2008 model for a 2010 version.

Yes... but you know, I'm running my household on 220 kWh per month. Well, actually, since I installed the A/C, that has gone up, but not by very much. I am running just one of the two A/C units about five hours per week, adding 15 kWh to the monthly total. (By mid-June I won't run either of them at all.) I don't think I'm destroying the planet too badly at that rate.

What are some of you guys using in terms of kWh per month?

tanstaafl.

Over the last 12 months I had a low of 588 kWh and a high of 2079 kWh.

We seem to be fairly steady at between 600 and 700 kWh monthly over the past 14 months. The house is about 1300 sq.ft on the main level, and there's another 1200 sq.ft of "space" in the basement.

The electricity goes mainly for heating (furnace fan), lighting, the basement dehumidifier, and the refrigerator. Plus some electric spot heating from time to time during cold weather. Oh, and the computing gear: I mostly work from home, and business use (heat, lights, computers) is probably about 30% of the total.

The furnace itself burns natural gas, as does the water heater and the kitchen range. Air-conditioning consists of windows and large shade trees.

The building was new in 1960, and was not particularly well constructed. We really should just tear it down and build something modern on the site, but that's too much fuss.

Cheers

I was just looking at my bill; We got solar which partially offsets us in December 2010. Our net usage (deducting solar) was 144kWh last month, and in the prior year (also solar) it was 35kWh. When we had no solar we averaged 12kWh/day (averaged over the whole year); The first full year with solar we averaged 8kWh/day.

The oldest portion of the house dates from between 1882 (map shows brickyard) and 1885 (found an old photo). Total of about 1350sq.ft. plus unfinished basement of about 400sq.ft., electric powers the computers, lights, fridge, furnace fan, washer, dryer (110v model, small, and used infrequently) AC (which we use about 3 days a year). Heat, cooking, and water are gas, and the insulation is not perfect so winter gas bills are of course more.

I've actually taken steps to eject some amount of power usage. I insisted on the most efficient fridge at the capacity we got, and giving the range the short shrift on the pot of money we had, because, well, fridge runs always and the stove exists to be a waste of energy. Likewise powering down computers except a mac mini and some DVRs, a CF in every light socket, and going to solely LED-backlit flat screens. Where else can I skimp?

The solar monitoring system, if you're curious:
https://enlighten.enphaseenergy.com/public/systems/5QmH10847

Though we did drop below 280kWh/mo back in June last year, we're back up to about 450kWh/mo now - pretty much all LED lighting (some CFLs, no incandescents). Back a couple of years ago I had the house "dark current" (ie, at night) down to sub 100W for everything including fridge average power, router, NAS box, 4x WiFi base stations, AT&T microcell, etc... but I think it's mysteriously grown these days. Need to track that down!

Single story 1250sqft Eichler, foam roof, dual-pane windows everywhere and a whole house fan (using cool air in the evening to air the house; it's well enough insulated that it can stay bearable during even the hottest days if you keep everything shut).

Our main power use is washing and drying, given that there are two kids making constant mess... at least one wash/dry per day. I really ought to get around to putting up the clothes line as we tend to have perfect clothes drying conditions in California

About 150 kWh/mo FTW.

This includes 4 fans, about 8 efficiency bulbs, 2 laptops, a fridge and a deep freeze. My neighbor wonders how I can use so much, as I use about 2-3 times what he uses.

Would be nice to have A/C or heated water, but I don't miss it on the power bill.

I'm not on solar any more since I moved into the village. Otherwise it would be 0 (deducting solar).

Answer:

tanstaafl.

My usage has been pretty stable at an average of about 17kW/h per day for years, so around 510kW/h a month. It's horrendous, but down to working from home and having a LOT of equipment. At any one time during the working day I might have up to six or seven computers running, six 24 inch monitors, and assorted electronics gear.

The main CAD box, which is a 3GHz quad-core Core2 unit with three dual-head radeon cards, driving four Dell 24 inch monitors, a 17 inch Acer one, lots of USB devices, and three drives, pulls a peak of 720W on boot and an average of about 380W when running normally. This one is on for about 12 hours a day most days. The bulk of the others are used much less except for the mail server and file server, which only take about 25-30W.

On the upside, while I use a lot of electricity, my gas usage for anything other than cooking and hot water is minimal, I don't use the central heating more than about a week a year.

Since I got the house cavity-wall insulated, in fact, the big problem is getting rid of the heat. I haven't decided whether I have a computer system that doubles as a space heater, or a heating system with an awful lot of processing power

The lathe (3kW) and milling machine (2kW) don't help, but they're not used a lot. The fridge, freezer, and a couple of small low power servers are on all the time, but are fairly efficient. Low energy bulbs throughout, the first thing that I did when I moved in 13 years ago. I still have at least two of the original bulbs working

I replaced all the monitors with LCD ones, and have steadily upgraded all the computers with more efficient parts, so although the number of machines seems to have grown rather a lot the average power usage has stayed surprisingly consistent the whole time.

One big change I made was to make sure everything not used is turned off at the wall (something I really like about UK power sockets, integrated switches on each one), as it's quite amazing how much power some devices draw in the allegedly OFF state. One shuttle, for instance, took something like 180W when on and running flat out, and 70W (!) when it was turned off. What the hell is going on there?

When I found that, I went through the entire house with a wattmeter and measured everything I could get access to, and made sure that anything not being actively used was switched off at source. That made a large difference.

In the UK a useful metric is that a 1W load running 24/7 represents about £1 a year expenditure at common domestic energy rates. So you can easily add up how much that TV is costing if it's drawing 54W in standby, as mine was...

The plasma screen is MUCH better, around 1.5W.

I did have a surprise when setting up the fileserver that lives in the shed as a backup device. It's a mini-ITX board with about 8TB of drives plugged in, and the motherboard claims a power draw of about 22W. When I first set it up, with a spare 250W PSU I had lying around, the machine pulled about 78W. Replacing the PSU with a 1U shuttle one dropped this to 28W. The standby load of the PSU itself was the other 50W. Not very efficient.

pca