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Power usage

U

UberPooner

Limp Gawd
Joined
Jul 21, 2005
Messages
435
Hi, how much power does my computer use when its on idle? i was just wondering because my mom would like me to turn off my computers at night because she says they use to much power when on idle. but its a hassle to do that lol. well just the turning back on part i hate. anyway i have a e6600, asus P5B, corsair 520w psu, 8800gtx and thats about it. will there be a big noticeable difference on the power bill with the computer on compared to when its off?
 
From the articles that I have seen leaving the pc on all day costs around 40-100 per year. That depends on the setup you have and a CRT uses far more power than an lcd.

 
I just read an article about this in the Wall Street Journal. I will repost it here (and link below) since WSJ articles sometimes vanish from being online. So show this to Mom:


A Hunt for Energy Hogs
A Columnist Looks to Cut His Electric Bill
And Finds Gadgets Aren't the Best Targets
December 18, 2006


Last week's Real Time discussed my apartment's dearth of outlets: Rooms designed for plugging in little more than a TV, a lamp or two and a vacuum cleaner now must support a TV and a fleet of related gadgets, or a personal-computer assemblage including extra monitors, an external hard drive, a printer and speakers. (Judging from the email, I'm far from alone in lamenting a lack of sockets.)

Touring my apartment and its outlets left me feeling not only annoyed but also vaguely guilty: All these TVs and cable boxes and computers and computer gear and chargers for various adapters had to be sucking up a lot of power, right? Particularly the ones that stay on 24 hours a day when they really shouldn't. Americans are using more and more power: According to the Energy Information Administration, average monthly residential energy consumption has risen to 938 kilowatt-hours in 2006 from 864 kwh in 1998 and 793 kwh in 1990. How much of that rise is from digital-age doodads?

I decided to find out, ordering a power meter to help discover the power hogs in my apartment. In the meantime, I tried to strike a small blow by dismantling the rat's nest of chargers in our kitchen and plugging them into a power strip I'd only turn on when something really needed to be charged.

When the power meter arrived, I spent several hours making my way around the house, unplugging things, plugging them into the power meter, and getting its verdict. (If you do this, it's easier to read the power meter if you first plug it into an extension cord.) I tested machines while plugged in but not actually doing anything and while being put through their paces.

I measured the watts a device drew, multiplied that by its typical daily run time (daily watt-hours), multiplied that by 30 to get monthly watt-hours, divided by 1,000 to get monthly kilowatt-hours, then multiplied that by .1693 -- at nearly 17 cents a kwh, electricity's expensive in New York City. So an air purifier that draws 120 watts and runs three hours a day uses 10.8 kWh per month, and is costing me about $1.83 on my monthly bill. (For a neat calculator I wish I'd discovered before cranking out my own Excel spreadsheet, check this out.)

Beyond my mathematical incompetence, some caveats. I didn't monitor devices' power use over time, which in some cases would have yielded a more-accurate reading -- as any pollster could tell you, we're rarely the best source for describing our own habits. (I did, however, account for different power levels: Your fridge doesn't cost you as much when the compressor's off, for instance.) I didn't unplug major appliances like the range or fridge, instead estimating their power needs by looking here and performing Web searches for specific models. I also didn't unplug some of the balkier parts of the apartment's wireless network, because I don't need that trouble. And I was only assessing a small piece of our apartment's total power consumption: Our gas bill is separate, and our water is billed as part of our monthly building maintenance.

So what did I find? Well, I should enjoy my moral victory in taming the charger farm, because the financial victory isn't so sweet. My power meter failed to detect even a watt going to waste in chargers with nothing plugged into them; while actually recharging something, our various chargers used about 4 watts each. The difference between a charger recharging a device 24/7 (something that wouldn't happen anyway) and one used carefully for an hour or so a day? About 48 cents a month. (That's not nothing, and over lots of households it definitely adds up, but it's not too exciting.)

Still, I'd suspected there wasn't a lot of money to save there. I was more interested to see how much power our apartment's other digital-era devices used. Again, the results were underwhelming: The heavily used agglomeration of PC/two monitors/printer/hard drive/speakers in my downstairs study costs a bit more than $10 a month. The PC in our bedroom costs about $6 a month. The upstairs laptop? Less than $1 -- a bit more than other always-on gadgets such as the router, cable modem, wireless repeater and Airport Express.

So what were our apartment's power hogs? The lights and the dryer. I estimate our lights cost us around $30 a month, nearly a third of that from a chandelier with eight bulbs. Then there's the dryer. I don't know exactly how many watts it uses, but estimate it's costing us at least $25 a month. With a 4 year old, we do a lot of laundry on the weekends, and our dryer is relatively small, meaning lots and lots of loads. (It's also fairly old and probably not very efficient.) After that, the fridge (about $13) and two TVs with assorted hanger-on devices ($6.50 and $4.75).

I did figure out that I could save $5 a month or so by instructing our computers to go into "standby" mode instead of "sleep" when not in use. (On a Windows PC, you can do this through the Power Options part of the Control Panel.) But while I was proud of myself for taming the various chargers and getting in the habit of turning off my printer and the stereo system's amplifier, but those savings add up to loose change every month. (For more tips on saving electricity, check out this site.)

If I really want to save money, the gadgets to look at aren't computers and chargers, but things my grandparents had. We looked into a bigger dryer about a year ago, but were scared off by the prospect of hiring an electrician and/or someone to run a gas line. Maybe it's time to take another look at those numbers. Meanwhile, switching from incandescent bulbs to compact fluorescents could reduce our light bill from $30 to less than $10, and the CFLs should last a lot longer.

Kateri Callahan, president of the Alliance to Save Energy, says a single CFL will save about $85 over the life of the bulb compared with incandescents – and reduce the need for air conditioning in the summer, as they put out less heat. According to Ms. Callahan, if every American home swapped just one incandescent bulb for a CFL, the savings would add up to $600 million. Another benefit that's harder to quantify but very real: Since our apartment has high ceilings, CFLs' long life would mean a lot fewer trips up and down a big stepladder.

After running my experiment, I feel confident pronouncing that gadgets don't deserve the real blame for our nation's mounting electric use. Rather, how about the fact that our houses are getting bigger and bigger: According to the National Association of Home Builders, the average size of a new home now tops 2,400 square feet, up from 1,645 square feet in 1975. The impulse to blame our gadgets for higher energy bills is a testament to our ambivalence of how they've transformed our lives -- an outlet, if you will, for the unease we sometimes feel at how thoroughly things have changed.

Real Time will return on Jan. 8, 2007 -- happy holidays! In the meantime, if you've cut your energy bills, I'd love to hear how you did it and what your biggest power hogs were. Write to me at realtime@wsj.com -- comments are posted periodically in this column. If you've got something to say but don't want your comments considered for publication, please make that clear.

http://online.wsj.com/public/articl...LUxdchdcCNfF4I_Q8jDZU_20071218.html?mod=blogs
 
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