High-powered computers and energy bills?

_tom_

_tom_

_tom_

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Hopefully this is the right forum to post this in, if not then sorry!

Anyway, I'm moving out of uni halls into a proper house/apartment type thing next year. So obviously we'll have to pay our own bills, whereas in halls we dont.

I'm just wondering how much extra (if any) its likely to bump up the electricity bill to leave my (fairly) powerful pc running all day, over a standard laptop or something?

I would use sleep mode but in Vista it doesnt seem to wake up properly from that until a reboot, so its fairly useless. Am I just worrying too much and it wont affect the overall cost much, or should I be turning it off whenever I'm not using it? Usually I just lock it and turn off my monitor when I go out..
 
If you need to run it 24/7, better to get an atom based setup instead and use your desktop for when its power is required.
 
Use hibernate. Never had a problem with it in vista..

Also high powered pc means nothing. They use a lot less than people think and even less when you aren't doing complicated tasks on it.

Best way to find out is get an electricity meter and see how much power it uses.
 
Well, for £10 to £20 you can plug in a little meter between the wall socket and your assumed extension lead into which all your PC bits and pieces are powered. It will tell you exactly how much power you are using over time.

That £10 to £20 will be a fraction of what your PC costs to run per year so is worth doing.

I would advise not running it 24x7 as that is a total waste of power. Shut it down at night. If you turn off the monitor, and the graphic card isn't being stressed by some fancy screen saver, and there is no disk, dvd, sound activity going on then your usage won't be too awful.

Edit: Whitecrook's estimate is in the right ball park. It is a little low for me ( I reckon on about £130 per year) but I have a stonking sound system and a couple of printers permanently connected, and my daily usage is about 16 hours per day.
 
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James07 said:
Running it all day is daft..
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Agreed.

You can buy an energy meter off ebay, I got one for about a tenner, it goes between the plug and the socket with an lcd display to tell me volatages and wattage and things. From that you can work out a rough cost.

Of course it will depend on useage and whats it doing when its just sitting there.
 
Ok cheers!

I usually just leave it on all day out of convenience, I dont like having to turn it off/on all the time. Good to hear they dont use as much power as I thought. I mostly just use mine for internet/msn/music etc but usually once a day I tend to game on it and do some 3D Studio Max stuff. And yeah its turned off at night.

How do I hibernate? Is that just the power button in the vista start menu where when you hover it says "saves your session and puts the computer in a low power state etc.." ?
 
From december
Actually, in the interests of accuracy I just checked - still have the meter thing plugged in to the wall... The Max draw was 272 Watts, this was at power on. The Min draw is 157Watts, and it's currently flicking between 158-160 Watt, so double what I wrote above !!

This machine has a Sempron 2600+ 8 ide, 2 SCSI, SCSI card, 2x IDE cards, 4 or 5 fans...

Uptime is 59 days - and according to my calculations, has costed approx £30 to run.. It's in the cupboard, it's noisy and expensive. Hence my replacing with a singel 1.5 TB drive later in the week.

PSU can't get the exact model, but it's a cheapy Casecom unit, 350 or 400 watt (no marking on outside)
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sooo/ £30 for 59 days = a good couple hundred a year.... But I would say that system ain't the most economical, and it has now been repalced with a 1.5TB drive, which I realised would be s significant cost saving.
 
Mines always idle when I'm not using it, unless I'm downloading something but thats not usually very likely either.

AcidHell2 said:
if you use sidebar download this
http://gallery.live.com/liveItemDetail.aspx?li=65daf803-c01f-43dd-bc61-4ddc9c8a9736&bt=1&pl=1
It's the yellow button on the end. Then you just hit the power button and it wakes up.
Click to expand...

I dont use sidebar as I find it pretty useless, but that seems like something useful to have for it! Might give it a go but I've got so used to not having a sidebar now :p
 
_tom_ said:
Ok cheers!

I usually just leave it on all day out of convenience, I dont like having to turn it off/on all the time. Good to hear they dont use as much power as I thought. I mostly just use mine for internet/msn/music etc but usually once a day I tend to game on it and do some 3D Studio Max stuff. And yeah its turned off at night.

How do I hibernate? Is that just the power button in the vista start menu where when you hover it says "saves your session and puts the computer in a low power state etc.." ?
Click to expand...


Turning things like computers on and off all the time isn't good.

Probably the major reason for failure of electronic goods is failures caused by the cumulative effect of thermal expansion and contraction as a result of heating up and cooling down due to being turned off and turned on. There is a balance between long term energy savings and long term component replacement. I wouldn't turn my equipment on or off more than a couple of times per day.

Incidentally the reason hi-fi enthusiasts leave their gear turned on all the time is primarily to get everything into thermal equilibrium - it allegedly sounds better after being on for a few hours, and secondarily to reduce the risk of component failure.
 
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