[ale] Electric bill

[Ron Frazier]

I've had some similar thoughts and concerns with my PC equipment, as 
well as several fans and air cleaners, etc. that I have. Here are some 
things to consider.

You may wish to consider budget billing, which will make your payment 
the same each month.  It won't reduce consumption though.  If the budget 
amount is too low, and if the winter or summer is particularly harsh, 
you may get a big bill at the end of the year for any shortage.  
However, in general, I like the same payment all the time concept.

The Kill-a-Watt device was mentioned in the thread.  I particularly like 
the Kill-a-Watt EZ, available from Home Depot and others for about $30.  
It has a neat feature that can calculate the time a device has been on 
and show you accumulated energy usage, as well as instantaneous usage.

Here's how you can gauge the impact of running any device.  Be 
especially wary of any device which runs 24 hours / day, as the 
kilowatt-hours add up quickly.  Here's what it would cost for each 100 
watts of consumption on a 24 hour / day basis.  Using 100 W (or .1 KW) 
for 1 hour is .1 KWH or kilowatt-hours.  The national average cost for 1 
KWH is about $ 0.10.  So:
.1 KW * 24 HR / Day * 30 Days / Month = 72 KWH / Month.  72 KWH / Month 
* $ 0.10 / KWH = $ 7.20 / Month to run a 100 W device all the time.  
With electronic equipment, this can really add up.  My laptops typically 
pull about 30 - 50 W of power, so they cost about $ 2 - 3 / Month to run 
all the time.  My desktop, plus a couple of monitors (one is my wife's), 
pull about 300 W, so running that all the time costs about $ 21 / 
Month.  You can use this type of math to gauge what type of equipment 
you want to run and for how long.  Those air cleaners I mentioned pull 
about 50 W and so they cost about $ 3 / Month to run all the time.

Sincerely,

Ron

On 6/4/2011 12:30 PM, David Hillman wrote:
> Our electric bill went up by $15 last month.  Either Georgia Power is 
> passing on some extra fees or we have to look at how we can use 
> electricity more efficiently.  Right now we have 3 laptops and 4 
> desktops that are plugged in mostly all the time.  One of the laptops 
> (Macbook Pro) is usually plugged into a 21" NEC monitor pretty much 
> all the time.  One of the desktops is a dual 604 pin Xeon server with 
> 4 hard drives--that's our VM server.  The other desktop is a P4 
> Prescott machine that acts as a security gateway appliance--it's 
> running Untangle 8.  The last desktop is a Core 2 Duo 2.66 Ghz machine 
> for general use and media serving.  Is that too much.?  I was 
> contemplating adding an old HP 4U server to the mix, but I thought 
> better of it.   My latest trip to Fry's had me thinking about 
> replacing all of the servers with some of those Mini-ITX boards. 
>  However, some of the boards feel pretty cheap and the others have way 
> more stuff than I need.  Supermicro has a couple of dual Atom Mini-ITX 
> server boards, but they are pretty expensive.  You get what you pay 
> for with those boards, though.
>
> I was thinking it would be a good idea for someone to make a Mini-ITX 
> server board with reconfigurable pin headers (future expansion), a 
> couple of USB ports, and maybe 5 or so PCI-E x1 slots.  The PCI-E 
> slots can later be filled with a couple of LAN cards and a RAID card. 
>  Some of the boards should have silent Atom chips and the others 
> should have 775 sockets.  There are a lot Core 2 Duo chips that could 
> be reused for light server use.  We have about 5 Dell machines in our 
> office with dead motherboards, but perfectly functioning C2D chips. 
>  Even better, make them compatible with CoreBoot (LinuxBIOS).
>
> What do y'all think?
>    

-- 

(PS - If you email me and don't get a quick response, you might want to
call on the phone.  I get about 300 emails per day from alternate energy
mailing lists and such.  I don't always see new messages very quickly.)

Ron Frazier

770-205-9422 (O)   Leave a message.
linuxdude AT c3energy.com

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