Electric Bill - PC usage ?

[Reektan]

Hey all..

Really odd. Had my Sweb bill for the last quarter and for some reason its £263. ) we dont have any gas so its all electric )

Most of the electric looks to have been used during the day. All I really have on is my little Shuttle PC with no screen on.

What do others normally find their electric bills are when PC's are involved?

Thanks.

 

[Tute]

Was a thread about this a while back, conclusion was that PC's don't use THAT much electric, so i'd look elsewhere for the offending article.

Of course, you are with SWEB (i'm in Exeter too) so expect mess-ups, mistakes, needless charges, etc.

You say your bill for the 3 months is £263, what kinda bill do you consider "normal"? i.e is a LOT of electric being wasted or a small amount?

 

[Snow-Munki]

heater on a lot ? that's the main one i believe.

 

[pastymuncher]

Think yourself lucky mate. I can only wish to have a bill that low. I live in a housing association property in Scotland and we have crappy night storage heaters and a couple of panel heaters in the bathroom and bedrooms and they are really uneconimical. I have spent over £1200 on electricity over the last 16 months. It is bloody cold up here, -2 all week during the day and down to -10 at night. Even the River Spey has had ice flowing down it!! Even so this house is bloody ridiculous and they won't do anything about it. £1200!! That would have been better spent upgrading my pc's!

 

[Bobbler]

heater on a lot ? that's the main one i believe.

What Snow-Munki said TBH.
The last quarter is usually the most expensive month for electric/gas bills because you spend longer in your home due to the dark evenings, you have on the heating more often due to it being colder this time of year and you also need to add in the week or two off over Christmas where you are normally out at work etc.
You want to try having a baby for big electric bills mate...with the kettle on the boil nearly all the time our bills has gone huge!

 

[Reektan]

I've had a nose at the sweb site.. I think basically my night storage heaters are too high. ( both set to 9 or they really dont get warm at all ) .. i've put them down to 5 .. guess i'll just not wear shorts and a shirt indoors and wrap up warm! :/

 

[Reektan]

My last bill was £130 when i wasnt really using the Night Storage heaters so this really does tie in to when they were switched on from NOV > JAN ... gas used to be so much easier and cheaper!

 

[Street]

Thats fair expensive... I live in a big house with 7 people. There are about 10 PCs (at least 5 of which are on constantly), countless consoles, TVS etc, our cooker is electric. Our bill for the last quarter was £288, was £230 in the 3 months before that.

 

[pcoltrane]

At a guess your PC will use maybe 80W or less idle and up to 200W full load (including a TFT screen).

Assuming 16hrs idle and 8hrs full load (that would mean pretty hardcore gaming full time) that would be (16 x 0.080) + (8x 0.200) = 2.880 kWh per day

One kWh generally costs 10p so your computer would cost 28.8p a day to run

That's approximately £26 per quarter.

However .... reality is that your pc (particularly if an AMD pc) may use quite a lot less power at idle, and even when in use probably won't use the full 200W all the time. Chances are it costs you less than £20 a quarter.

If that's too much, maybe try switching on cool'n'quiet. That should cut idle power usage by a few watts without making any real difference to performance (you can use crystal cpu-id to change the cnq voltage/clock speeds at each step so you can still overclock)

A certain electronics store sell a very cool power meter for £12.50 (plugs into the socket, electrical items plug into it) that shows current usage, average, kwh etc etc. I have one and it's interesting to see how much power everythign uses. Generally pcs are less than you think - my media centre barely uses more than 60W at any time.

Marc