I got in an argument with my mother today about the power consumption of my computer. I leave it on most of the time, downloading stuff (I have dialup, so it takes a while to download things of 100MB+). When I leave the computer alone, I turn everything off except the tower. So it made me curious how much electricity I’m “wasting” in her opinion.
Well, your computer’s power supply is probably a standard 300W or 350W model, so your computer can’t possibly draw more than that. Your main CPU chip might be taking 50+W under full load, much of it lost in waste heat. Since you’re doing downloads (NOT a major CPU strainer) instead of, say, video rendering, your machine will not be running anywhere near maximum load.
How much of a concern this is depends on how much electricity costs in your area. I typically pay about 5 cents/kilowatt hour (though I live Quebec, with abundant hydroelectric supplies). Even if my 300W power supply was cranked to maximum (it never is), running my computer would cost me about 1.5 cents an hour, or 36 cents over 24 hours. If you live in an expensive area, it might cost as much as, oooh, let’s say $1 a day.
Big freaking hairy deal.
While this is outdated, it can give you an idea.
http://www.microsoft.com/NZ/presscentre/articles/2001/august-01_consumption.asp
I run my computers all the time, well I have two that are on all the time and my electric bills are pretty small.
I would take a guess that the “average” home computer left on all the time takes up about the equiv of a 40-50 watt bulb, an appliance bulb comes to mind here. This is taking into consideration it’s full CPU load and it’s idle time.
Your monitor will take up a lot of power but not the tower.
The best bet is to set the power settings to go to idle after a certain amount of time. I only do that with my monitor.
In many circles, I run in one of those, it is considered better for the life of the computer to remain on 24/7. This keeps the computer components in a more stable temperature environment so that it doesn’t stress the circuits from extreme on and off, on and off. Some disagree, but it works for me.
I just look at the computer manual & in the back it states the power consumption. Same for my monitor & my printer etc.
I leave my Pentium 4 desktop on all the time because I’m running a protein-folding program in the background. (plug: http://folding.stanford.edu )
With my CPU running at 100% I estimate it uses about 60W of power. I consider it a good cause and I can afford to contribute $1 / day.
According to Hot Hardware’s website, a 2 GHz Pentium 4 can use 72W, but the newer 2.2GHz CPU built on a smaller die only uses 55W. Another site claims that the faster Athlon processors can also use 70W.
Figuring in a little overhead for cooling fans, idling hard drives and power supply inefficiencies, I doubt you’re using more than 100W.
My intuition tells me that your mechanical devices will consume the most power. If you have frequent enough disk activity, which may be the case, since you say you’re mostly “downloading stuff”, then the disk won’t spin down. Maybe the same deal for fans.
Man I wish I could remember my high school physics class details. Someone asked this question and the class had to work out the details.
Essentially, leaving you computer on all day long (w/o monitor) was roughly equivalent to running a hairdryer or a toaster for 1 minute.
I know my details aren’t specific, but the bottom line is tell your mom not to worry about it.
When was your class? that number seems to be off by about a factor of 90.
We had a thread about tuning your computer off at night. The subject of how much power was consumed came up. I found a site where a guy measured the power consumed by his various computers and about 75W was about right for a pretty nice computer from about a year or two ago. I think this was not including the monitor which do use quite of power when not turned off due to inactivity. So 1 day of computer is 1.5 hours of hair drying. In general the faster you micro processor the more power it uses. The amount of power that a computer uses has been going up.