Cost a month for running my PC 24/7

glenimp617 · 14 Oct 2013 at 16:10

Hi all,

Please forgive my general stupidness, but I'm trying to work out how much a month it costs leaving my PC on all day. I've gone through a PSU calculator and worked out the load against my PSU. Then I added on 0.8 due to it being 80+ efficient. My PC runs a media server and hosts up content for all the family, both at home and through the Internet. It obviously won't be spot on as my PC could be idle for a few hours, then encoding at 100% cpu a few hours later. PSU is 600w Corsair.

This is the calculation I have come up with over a full month

270w x 730hrs ÷ 1000 x 11.48p / 100 = £22.62

I'm with EDF energy on their blue price promise (by far the cheapest at the time I switched). Does this sound about right, or am I way off.

Just doing it as I was curious

Steveocee · 14 Oct 2013 at 16:30

Way off.
I pay by meter so can see how much we pay. If that was the case I''d know about it in a big way.

Attu90 · 14 Oct 2013 at 16:36

What do you pay per month for your total electricity ? £22 pm is about 1/3 of my total elecy bill per month.

joeyjojo · 14 Oct 2013 at 16:46

glen8 said:
270w x 730hrs ÷ 1000 x 11.48p / 100 = £22.62

The calculation is correct.

270 W may or may not be though, so if you're interested the only way to know exactly how much power the machine is using is with an energy meter (ocuk used to stock this one).

RJC · 14 Oct 2013 at 16:47

What is your system spec?

d_brennen · 14 Oct 2013 at 16:58

270w? O.o

oceaness · 14 Oct 2013 at 18:37

It's very unlikely that your rig is averaging 270 watts over 24 hours, it'd probably be nearer 150 watts, if you use it for a bit of encoding.

nick.lidgett · 14 Oct 2013 at 18:58

I read somewhere that if you gamed non stop on an xbox 360 for a whole year it would cost £600 so that's like £11 pw, I cant imagine a pc using more than that under normal/average use

Huggie86 · 14 Oct 2013 at 19:06

Mines on most of the time and its hardly noticeable. Definitely more noticeable when I've spent more time gaming as the power draw goes way up

d_brennen · 14 Oct 2013 at 19:08

Gaming uses a ton of power because GPUs use a lot of power to power games. High power (and/or old) GPUs use a lot of power. Unless using GPU acceleration, then the GPU will hardly be doing anything. I don't recall any stock CPUs that munch ~200w+ (leaving a very healthy 70w margin for lots of disks etc), unless you're running some kind of exotic IBM SPARC setup

Jasseh · 14 Oct 2013 at 20:12

I've been wondering what my PC costs to run too (mainly because my partner keeps complaining) so I've just ordered one of those power meters (shame I couldn't order it from here).

I'm sure mine will be using much more than yours though

(especially after I upgrade to i7-4770k).

decto · 14 Oct 2013 at 21:06

As above, the calculation is fine, just need to confirm the average usage for your system.

My current server is an AMD x4 640 @ 3Ghz with 5 HDD, 1 SSD, TV card and Satellite card.

Idle ~60W, encoding/prime95 ~125W .... spends 90%+ at idle

Hotwired · 14 Oct 2013 at 21:20

270W sounds like the power draw of a high end single card rig while doing something taxing like gaming (yes people frequently have overspec PSUs).

Your calculation is saying that's what your computer is using 24/7

You'd need a plug in electricity meter or a lot of time on your hands to accurately check the power use of your computer over a period of time.

IvanDobskey · 15 Oct 2013 at 10:26

No way your PC will average 270w over 24 hours. When not doing anything taxing it will use power saving options and consumption will drop right down.

glenimp617 · 15 Oct 2013 at 13:57

Thanks Guys!!

some very useful replies, I guess it's hard to get a proper costing without having a meter on 24/7 watching exactly the draw during idle / encoding