Quarterly electricity bill reduction from turning my PC off at night

lol , he bit [ seem to remember you posting something about bug years ago , err though i cant find it on a search ]


i was on another forum and tried to find out for some woman how much her DAB radio would take ON STANDBY and couldnt find any information.. ( she was trying to see if it was worth unplugging it)

i thought "oh thats coz it's currys own brand, i'll checkout PURE" , couldnt find anything there either when i looked .

on the face of it "shocking" that my tv does take 1 watt on standby ( i've checked ), but a radio ( average ones quoted there) takes 6..

 

Hmm. I don't recall that (not that that means anything!), but I did post something on the portable DAB+MP3 player.

It was just pure (pardon the pun) coincidence that this thread appeared when a press release (which get CC'd to the company) on the 'eco' product line was published.

I imagine that quite a bit is lost in the wall transformer which could be permanently on - I tend to switch my DAB radio off at the wall.

 

Thanks God the electricity is not that expensive here.

I have my PC always on + some gadgets + plasma and LCD TVs and 2 Big 400+L refrigerators + Big washer and dicroic lamps everywhere with mild light always on at night. About US$ 150,00/month.

 

Not expensive? 150 USD pcm sounds expensive to me. Anyway, cash is not the only issue; carbon is too...unless all your power is, miraculously, CO2 neutral.

 

Brazil is big in hydroelectric power I think (eg. this). Carbon neutral if you ignore the 1350 sq. km of rotting flooded rain forest.

 

beggers belief that in the past nobody thought "err shouldnt we deforest these areas first ?"

 

Yes, it is very expensive. I was joking

Most of the energy come from hydroelectric power.
In my town the energy comes from this one: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sobradinho

 

Okay guys this is getting confusing. If I hibernate my PC at night, does it save electricity or is it negligible in the long run?

 

It's pretty much the equivalent to shutting off your PC.

 

They're just talking about home electronics. That excludes all the big hitters like air conditioning, fridge, freezer, washing machine, dryer, etc.

For the average US household we're talking about 5% of total usage that goes into standby. Not sure how commercial and industrial use is affected, but those combine for 3 times the household usage.

 

I'm not sure, but I think the majority of this rotting happens from things other than trees. Moreover, deforesting would only remove the trunk of the tree, not the branches/leaves/root as those would probably be too expensive to ship out. There's tons of stuff rotting on the rainforest floor and even below the surface.

 

I'm surprised sometimes at how much people under estimate how much power these machine take up, Almost everyone I know just leaves their PC's on all the time and then complain about the power bills. Down here I know some friends that left all three of their PC's on all the time and left my Ps3 folding non stop while it was there, end of the month they had a $500 (Aus) power bill much to their shock. I practically had to go in to solve all their power problems.

While Microwaves and Fridges do chew up a lot of power while running they arne't active for long, most Fridges are only running the motor for a few minutes an hour, in fact Fridges are considered the longest lasting consumer device around since they have such low ware due to this, and with Microwaves you only cook stuff on average of no more than 10 minutes once a day so it never adds up to much.

I find it odd at how in the last few years people are after the most powerful PSU they can get their hands on considering that not many machines they they are buying them for even need anything as powerful as they get. I mean a Celecor with a 7200 card doesn't need a 600W power supply to run well.

Personally my machine is running on a 185Watt LiteON power supply to keep my machine nice and low overall and it is perfectly stable, other wise I have a Mac mini that idles at 10 Watts and peaks at 30 watts in action which is brilliant for keeping the costs down.

 

if you don't have a kila-watt, you are wasting money.


we have put power strips everywhere to physically turn off all our electronics, it's insane. Yes, your air conditioner draws 2000 watts... but when it's on for 20 minutes out of the hour... it draws the same as a 600 watt computer over the course of the day... not to mention that 600 watt computer does a great job of heating up the room, making the ac just turn on more. Refridgerators and microwaves are nothing compared to left on lights/tv's/standby/and trickle chargers. Shoot i have 4 cellphone chargers i used to leave plugged in all the time, that's 20/30 USD/year... just for leaving stuff plugged in. Multiply that by roomates, and hundreds of other electrical devices... yea, you can save a huge amount on power if you just switch everything off. Our power bill was 1/2 to 1/4th of all my friends during the middle of our hot southern summer, and i like it cold, so our AC was on ALOT

 

I thought PC PSUs only draw what they need so even if you had a 1KW PSU, it wouldn't be drawing nearly that for much of the time. In addition, I thought the headroom can allow for an increase in efficiency.

 

It depends on the type and build design of the PSU in question. There will always be an optimal load for maximum power transfer that produces a minimum amount of waste heat. i.e. the transformer is designed to output at a specific voltage and current.

Sure the device will draw what it needs, but if the PSU is designed to output at a certain power, any "unused" power is converted to waste heat. Some higher quality PSU's have active power factor corrections that adjust the circuit design to match the load to reduce waste heat thereby increasing efficiency, but it can only do so much.

If you're only expecting to draw a few hundred watts, you're wasting your time overcompensating by buying a 1000W power supply "just-in-case".

 

I'm not sure how to interpret that statement. In an electrical system, when you achieve maximum power transfer you will, IIRC, be wasting 50% of the energy. Can you be more precise about what you mean?

 

hmm.... oh wait.. .I got mixed up with impedance matching. I actually meant... rated output. ack. (that's what I get after a few beers and being close to bedtime). Sorry.