Quarterly electricity bill reduction from turning my PC off at night

Rys

Rys

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Now, bear in mind that my electricity supplier recently cut prices a bit, and that I was overcharged for the prior quarter (but not by much).

Feb-Apr - £288
May-Jul - £97

I have gas for heating, so the main consumers of electricity in my house are my home office and the cooker, given me and the missus don't watch TV (although we do watch ~1 DVD a week). Cooking has remained constant, but for the past 3 months since that £288 bill landed and I took serious offense at the amount, I've been turning off (almost, I leave my router and Ethernet switch on) everything in my office at night.

I used to leave the PC on (no standby or hibernate), and didn't turn the displays off completely, instead just leaving them to hit their standby state. Seems that's cost me a fair chunk of money. I now turn everything off at the wall when I'm done for the evening.

While it's not responsible for all of that ~£180 reduction (it simply can't cost £60 a month to power my PC and displays), it seems that the cost savings from turning it off are definitely worth it.

I now curse my PC's slow boot times in the morning, but I've got into the habit of turning it on then making my first cuppa of the day in parallel, to hide the time spent wondering why a £3000 workstation can't start up to desktop in 4 seconds from cold in 2007, with Vista's fast boot promises a load of standby bollocks :devilish:

I feel like a right idiot for leaving it on for weeks at a time, only switching it off when going away for the weekend or whatever. I might as well just burn a bunch of fivers once a month, not even stopping to get warm from the blaze :LOL:

Ah well, lesson learned!
 
Have you tried Vistas "Sleep" mode? That effectively turns the PC off but has a start up time of about 4 seconds.
 
Rys said:
I have gas for heating, so the main consumers of electricity in my house are my home office and the cooker,
Click to expand...
IIRC, the main consumers of electricity in a house are typically the refrigerator and freezer, but maybe you eat out.

When you say "switch off" the PC, do you mean just shutting it down or actually turning off the power at the socket?

As for lights, I'm also considering the LED replacements for the GU10 Halogens. They apparently give off light equivalent to a 20watt halogen, but consume under 2watts. Has anyone else had an experience with these?
 
Ah, forgot about the fridge freezer. But that's a constant factor in the bill (or thereabouts) so I can (hopefully) ignore that in the bill price just like I ignore the cooker.

I run energy saving bulbs in almost every room in the house, other than the throne room (I find peeing in the semi dark isn't always a great idea, so I like the instant on of a regular bulb there!). Haven't tried any LED-based ones yet.

Turning off my office is shutting everything down, then turning off the plug at the wall (so PC, displays, speakers, etc all get turned off). Router and switch are on a separate socket.

I've taken my watt meter round the house and in the living room I pull about 10W from everything in there on standby, so I could save a few quid by turning that stuff off at the wall as well, although the plug's behind the sofa and it's a pain in the arse to reach.
 
Rys said:
I run energy saving bulbs in almost every room in the house, other than the throne room (I find peeing in the semi dark isn't always a great idea, so I like the instant on of a regular bulb there!).
Click to expand...
I think the brand/model can make a huge difference in that respect. We have some that go to full brightness in about .5 of second after switching on (and others that seem to take a minute).
 
When i move out i'll probably go all LED, unless there is a better alternative in a year or two. In our house we're currently changing our main lightbulbs to low energy ones, like hallway, stairs and lights that are usually on. They take some time to "boot up" though which i've found nice. I didn't like being blinded when i took a midnight stroll to the little boys room.
 
It was probably turning it off at the wall socket that made the majority of the saving.

There was this invention on Dragons Den once that was a real eye opener with regards "standby" modes etc.etc.

I turned all my stuff off at the wall for a good few days after seeing that :LOL:
 
15W gas-based bulbs produce the same light intensity as a regular 100W bulb, that's my preferred way since I like it bright.

LED's are very efficient (>90% rate), so yes, those do the job. But I'd go for a bigger one if it should be called a "light", otherwise you can just use candles IMO :)
 
One small note:
Hibernate turns off the PC just as much as a Start->Turn Off Computer->Turn Off.
So when hibernating, it's OK to turn off the power at the wall. At least, I haven't had any problems with it.
 
I've been shutting my desktop computers off at the power supply. I should probably just do the entire power bar (speakers & monitor). I mostly use my laptop because I usually don't play games (it's more like binge playing). All our lights are those energy saving ones. But our big constant power suckers include two basement freezers, a mini-fridge, and a regular fridge.

It ticks me off whenever someone asserts that turning the thing on and off daily is detrimental to the hardware or leaves the electronic appliance running while they go off and do something else for awhile when they could have turned it off. Basically I tell them, "Well you do the same with your TV and car, don't you? And that's even more frequent. Oh wait, you leave your car idling for an hour when you know you're not getting back in for 10 minutes?" :rolleyes:

It makes me wonder how much electricity we as a race could have saved by being more conscious or aware. :|
 
I've been shutting off my electronics at the power bars for weeks now ever since I read how much electricity many electronics take in standby like the x360's powerbrick. It may not be much savings for some people depending on how many electronics you have but a dollar saved is a dollar earned. I also stopped folding when I read that your CPU on constant load can increase the bill by about $5.
 
Over the next ten years starting next apparently we are getting new electricity use meters that can track individual apparatus by their unique draw, and has a built in webpage which you can use to read out your electricity costs per machine ... pretty cool! And very useful, look forward to it.

If you have a watt-meter, Rys, then I suppose you can tell pretty exactly what your computer is using/costs?
 
Hibernate mode has been with us since at least Windows 2000. Indeed it worked better for me on crappy older non-ACPI conformant hardware (plain APM) than regular standby.

Normally I will turn off everything at night, except the router which has a 2GB flashdrive attached to it. I figured it suffices for quickly saving documents at night over WiFi instead of having a USB harddisk as a streaming server where the external powersupply draws twice or three times the power the harddisk actually needs.

Another thing that bothers me is when my Samsung LCD draws 10W all the time despite being _completely shut off_ even when it says in the spec sheet it should only draw 2W in _standby_.
Laser printer and other peripherals I keep unplugged unless I'm about to use them.

Refrigerator and electrical stove/oven may take the lion's share of your bill since we eat almost exclusively home cooked food, but it's still better than nothing.
 
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