My old UPS didn’t do the job it was hired for anymore as of the last power outage. I guess since it was an 8 year old lead acid battery I should have expected that.
So I went and got a new UPS, with a spangly LED display of power consumption.
I have my system, (upper medium end, 260 GTX, i7 930), monitor(only 19 inch Flatscreen stupid puny desk cubby), wireless router, speakers, and cable modem pluged into it for these tests.
Normal surfing load: .2Kw
Under Windows 7 performance test( I figured it was the closest thing to a standard stress load people might be able to compare to): .36 kw peak
Playing Tropico 3(last game I grabbed at steam for cheep) .28 Kw
Left alone for 20 minutes to nap and shut monitor off :.17 Kw
at local rates of.111 cents per KW/h that 22 cents an hour most of the time, and 19 an hour when not in use. Left on 24 hours a day that’s between 14 and 18 bucks a month.
Something to think about, I assumed resting was much better than that, I may have to start shutting it all the way down more often, I leave it on most nights, just in case I get insomnia and need to get my mind distracted.
Anybody else have a meter and bored enough to check?
Try turning off your speakers. I remember someone (maybe here) saying the speakers constituted about $3 a month to his electric bill and even though he had no interest in powering down the computer when he wasn’t using it, he started turning off the speakers.
My dad just unknowingly bought a surge protector that will automatically shut things off if a main device is not drawing a certain amount of power. So, when the computer goes to sleep mode, the monitor shuts off. The speakers could be made to do this, too.
And since Windows 7 uses hybrid sleep, you could even unplug the surge protector, and still come back right where you were.
Your numbers are consistent with most every computer. Most computers draw less than 200 watts. And can intermittently peak at up to 350 watts. So the most naive computer assemblers recommend 700 and 800 watt supplies. Go figure.
NY Times recently discussed cable set-top boxes. These consume more power than a refrigerator. These boxes are only 0.05 kw. More examples of numbers that so many ignore.
Hybrid sleep or hibernate is available on virtually every machine. No reason to leave a desktop or laptop running all day when hibernate is so convenient.
Mine doesn’t seem to have that option. It does have a schedule where you can turn your computer off and on on automatically. It may help a bit for those days when I forget and leave it on while I am at work all day(in fact it should help double because a lot of the power the computer wastes turn into heat I have to pay to air condition away.) but no outlet configuration to turn other things off.
stupid puny desk cubby), wireless router, speakers, and cable modem pluged into it for these tests.