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
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
Ah well, lesson learned!
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
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
Ah well, lesson learned!