Quarterly electricity bill reduction from turning my PC off at night

On console I normally just pause my game till I play it again and PCs are on 24/7. I am thinking of picking up one of those stable power supply so it can be on all year around, avoiding the rare black outs and stuff.

I would turn it off, if it was instant on and instant off type of thing like monitors or lights, but I don't like booting/loading things up. They should fix that design. It’s really annoying.
 
Arwin said:
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?
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Yeah, I could run the numbers, I've just never been too conscious of it until the quarter before last. I think I'll get another one or two and do some experiments around the house to see what I can reasonably get away with.

That kind of per-appliance monitoring system you outline above would be sweet, hope that shows up on our shores as well.

I was thinking about it a bit more today, and the reason I don't use hibernate is because of a bad experience with it on my PC about 3 years ago, where randomly bringing the system out of hibernation would either BSOD, or the display would never wake up. Since then I've just left my system on pretty much constantly.

Might give it a new go, since I've got entirely new components since then. 8GiB hiberfil.sys here I come :p
 
Rys said:
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
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I rather think something else must be going on there. Fans or something for the summer? Otherwise you cut your bill by 2/3rd for a 1/3rd reduction in usage of your computer. I mean, I see you in IRC at 2 AM your time regularly, so I'm pretty sure you're not getting 16 hrs of sleep a night! :p
 
I just keep a really low-end, poorly specced server running 24/7, 52/365 :)razz:) and keep the majority of my files stored on that. When I want to play a game or watch a movie, I boot up my machine, get out the drink and chips/foodstuffs, and watch away. When i'm done, every single thing gets powered down and unplugged except for that little server...

Works a treat. I haven't done a power usage comparison but I can basically say that from when I used to have both my server and my PC on all the time, the little 'usage' bars on my power bill have dropped by well over half. It does make a massive difference. That and I only use those flourescent low power lights everywhere (I like the sterile whiteness of them).

Hey Rys, what are your system specs? (Mainly the PSU). I used to use two 550w PSU's in my system, then moved onto a single 850w. I suspect the two 550's were really inneficiant and just burned through power.
 
V3 said:
On console I normally just pause my game till I play it again and PCs are on 24/7. I am thinking of picking up one of those stable power supply so it can be on all year around, avoiding the rare black outs and stuff.

I would turn it off, if it was instant on and instant off type of thing like monitors or lights, but I don't like booting/loading things up. They should fix that design. It’s really annoying.
Click to expand...

My god, good job you car starts quickly or no doubt you'd leave that running constantly :D
 
Interesting topic. I've started tracking my power consumption on a monthly basis and started trying to optimize it. Recently installed a programmable thermostat, switching gradually to CFL's (as other bulbs burn out), went from running 2-3 PC's 24-7 to running 1 PC when needed, turning off my water heater when out of the house for a couple days (tank-type, so it wastes energy as it maintains the water temp even when not using hot water), insulated pipes coming out of water heater.

The result is I've saved 50-60% on my electricity usage in the spring/summer months since I started paying more attention, and saved roughly $200 over 7 months (well, $110 after you take out the costs of the thermostat and pipe insulation). In June through August '06 I used 3500 kw/hrs in my house, in June through August '07 I used 1300. All 3 of those months in '07 came in to less power than I used in July '06.

The majority of those savings were turning off the PC/using standby... with all 3 machines on (and active, since they were often folding), I could draw 400+ kw/hr per month from those alone, plus the additional cost to cool my house with essentially the equivalent of a 500-600 watt electric heater running in my computer room during the summer months...

Also got a wall meter so I could check out standby usage... most of my stuff doesn't draw much on standby fortunately, but I did find out the home theater amp I have (and usually just left on for convenience) draws 65 watts (47 kw/hr per month), and PC amp drew 20-25 watts, so that stuff stays off most the time now.

It's definitely worth paying a little more attention to efficiency!
 
Rys said:
I was thinking about it a bit more today, and the reason I don't use hibernate is because of a bad experience with it on my PC about 3 years ago, where randomly bringing the system out of hibernation would either BSOD, or the display would never wake up. Since then I've just left my system on pretty much constantly.
Click to expand...
I would recommend trying S3 (suspend-to-RAM) instead of S4 (suspend-to-disk, aka hibernate). The power savings are practically the same, S3 is more stable and the wake-up is near-instantaneous.
 
Bolloxoid said:
The power savings are practically the same, S3 is more stable and the wake-up is near-instantaneous.
Click to expand...
Diffference is though if you lose power during sleep you can still boot up and get all your work back if you suspend to disk..

I'd feel a bit safer suspending to disk but unfortunately none of my PCs will suspend to anything. Power saving is a damn buggy mess IMO that has never really worked right. It will usually work fine for a couple days after a freshly reinstalled OS but after a couple driver/windows updates it bugs out and hangs or bluescreens the PC when trying to enter sleep.

These days I simply turn my PC off and leave jsut the PS3 running folding, it may draw close to 200W but it's so much faster than a PC that folding per watt is much greater anyway.
Peace.
 
Rainbow Man said:
Diffference is though if you lose power during sleep you can still boot up and get all your work back if you suspend to disk..
Click to expand...

So hit the save button...

A PC in S3 typically burns about 15W I've found, whereas S4 or powered-down-but-not-switched-off-at-the-wall consumes about 4W.
 
Rainbow Man said:
Yech. I thought it takes way long for windows to save out just a 2GB hiberfil..

There's apparantly a downside even to having all the memory one'll ever need! :LOL:
Peace.
Click to expand...

Hmm. I'd assume that overwhelming majority of that 2GB would caches and stuff which would be sensible to flush before going to power save mode. Have they really implemented it as a direct dump of all RAM to disk...? Maybe I'm naive but I'd expect kernel to be able to tell which memory blocks are worth saving and which are not.
 
Geo said:
I rather think something else must be going on there. Fans or something for the summer? Otherwise you cut your bill by 2/3rd for a 1/3rd reduction in usage of your computer. I mean, I see you in IRC at 2 AM your time regularly, so I'm pretty sure you're not getting 16 hrs of sleep a night! :p
Click to expand...
Rys must not have air conditioning. That's by far the biggest drain on electricity in my house. I have gas heat and live in a warm climate so I've had my electricity bill go down to $30 around January. August was $170 and the only real difference is it's been damn hot outside.
 
getting S3 mode on my PC was a matter of changing one setting in the BIOS, then using regular stand by in XP. I read later than it should have been more cumbersome because of XP having been installed with BIOS set to S1 mode but I guess I was lucky (I love that KT333 mobo)

wake up from keyboard is useful also, in my BIOS it's set to CTRL-F1. I used it before to wake up from shutdown. some BIOSes allow the space key too. not sure if USB keyboards play nice, I still use PS/2 mouse and keyb.
I used to standby the PC when getting out, and when I'd come back turn on the speaker, press ctrl-F1 and music playback resumed instantly, that was impressive and nice :).

but now I just shutdown, the PC is fast at shutdown and boot up. no tray bar craplets, no desktop icon, a few disabled services, and only a few useful things that load at start up (task manager, winamp, tclock and autohotkey. there's the AVG service in the background and I launch the tray program manually when neeed).
Besides the boot speed issue which turns off (hehe) people from shutdowning, I'm fairly certain bloated and/or useless software are responsible for higher consumption. the worldwide total for crapware, spyware, bad jabascripts, flash ads and millions other things must be hilarious.

the thread gave me a further idea, bind a hotkey such as win+s to enter S3 mode.
which I've just done and tested, it was a matter of adding this in autohotkey.ini
#s::DllCall("PowrProf\SetSuspendState", "int", 0, "int", 0, "int", 0)
check that software out , it's extremely powerful, light and free, with a help file that nears perfection. http://www.autohotkey.com/
 
i got a power monitor thing from maplin,, 15 quid,, to see what my tv was pulling when in standby..

as i expected since it was a new one,, and took longer to power up than my prev tv,, it really does just take 1watt..

anyone any idea how much a DAB radio takes ? ??


i stil havent' tested the pc,, but it did kick me into flipping my cables about so i have a single off switch for my tv/router/cablemodem/vcr/dtv-recorder/Wii..........


freezer is interesting,, might do some research,,, wonder how long a new "A" rated one would "save it's cost" in electricity saved ??
 
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