Blogs How Much Does Your PC Cost To Run?

you should of checked vamparic power draw. when i compaired s3 sleep to off the difference was 2watts or less

you can get some extension leads which turn stuff on and off based off a master socket, so itll kill the power to devices like printers when the computer is off

 

Blimey that's cheap! I'm not in central London any more so I can't get that, but I still thought I was on a really good deal with Atlantic Electric, Economy 7:

Standard Day: 20.20p
Discounted Day: 14.52p

Need to have a look around I think...

Anyway, I did this myself a while back as I was thinking of building a web-surfing / emailing / basic PC to save money, (mine idles at about 135W) - turned out to not be cost effective, and as Blackshark said, it's hardly environmentally friendly buying loads of new stuff for the sake of it. (And I have a drawer full of those unwanted energy saving bulbs as well - I already had some fitted, what a waste!).

The biggest thing for burning electricity in my house is my 18 year old, (but still perfect condition) fridge freezer - which I think is costing me about £15-20 a month. I may have to replace that pretty soon, I should do the maths on it, though I hate getting rid of things that still work - I still have a perfectly serviceable CRT TV...

 

Didn't know so had a look. The main gaming rig consumes 8W when in sleep mode, so not too far off.

 

as put my housemate Jack off using it...

"Jack off" lol!!

 

Faults in electricals can waste electricity. My parent's in law use around 1200W when nothing is being used (i.e. when everybody is out) and the bill is stupidly high. It was only this morning when turning on the oven caused the circuit breaker to cut out power (and did so every time) that we turned off the oven by the mains that the Watt monitor said we were using 450W.

Turned out that for 6 years the faulty oven was using about 750W an hour on "idle"... Ouch

So, get a Watt monitor and check out your electricity usage, incredibly useful and makes you aware of what you use.

 

I remember discussing this on another forum (based in the US) and it was a really interesting discussion.

Based on a hypothetical cost of 15 pence per kwh and roughly 8 hours per day drawing 250W (includes 1 monitor), my PC costs under £10 per month.

If anybody is curious about PC running costs, there's a great "electricity running cost calculator" here.

And the biggest power draw in our house is the heating - we don't have gas central, just electric panel/storage heaters which we use every day (especially in winter). Even so, still paying only £70 per month average for the entire electricity bill each year. Go go scottish hydro

 

Curiosity sorted 50p a month

 

I'm probably better off not knowing what my rig uses..I just it'll make me cry..

 

That may be true for your country , but electricity here in Ireland costs three times as much.

 

But it works three times as hard

 

I've not really checked .

 

I was going to quote that same part, it was hilarious and I can't help thinking another thing.

I have to do the same thing in my house, a 3 stories villa (it's a moradia/vivenda, don't know the word in english for that) and check every device plugged in to the power grid

 

i used to have my atom/ion based file server sleep automatically after an hour of inactivity, but ive discovered i was only saving myself about $0.50 or so a month by doing so. it costs me less than $2 a month to run it 24/7 and now i dont have to wait for it to wake up before i can access my files. it also means my vent and minecraft servers have 100% uptime.

 

Here is the U.S. they keep telling us the cell phone chargers are killing our bills.

Sure.
Granted, yes they are plugged in constantly. Yes, there may be two of them, but get real. If you figure out the actual cost of them staying plugged in, it's almost nothing.


The quick and dirty one watt equals a dollar/pound per year is just that, quick and dirty, but it does work quite well. Even if not very precise, it's still a fast easy way to see if what you are doing is worth doing.

For example, I had a small server running a P4, I had done all I could to it to drop the wattage, and according to my UPS (not accurate I admit) I had it down to about 35 watts idle. I thought I would try and lower that, I did, down to about 25 watts. However, it cost me $200 to do. Only later did I find that I could have run the old one for years for that much. Granted this is idle, off idle, the new system is faster and half the wattage of the old one. So while it could be said that it will take a while to recover, when you account for the increased abilities and speeds, I think it was worth doing. Especially when I sell off the old one for half the new one's cost.



Oh, and to those considering similar, research first.
Atoms are NOT always the best answer and they are not as efficient as people think. Look into idle wattage of more powerful processors before you go buy an Atom. An I3 may seem to use more power until you look at idle wattage and also consider how much faster it will process information. The same applies to P4's and the old Core series. You might be surprised at what you find.

More importantly, look at your drives. Drives use a LOT of power, especially older ones. A few drives can easily take a few dozen watts, while a new lower power 2Tb may only use 15-20. It's silly to go buy an Atom then throw a bunch of old drives in it. Keeping the processor and replacing those old drives would be a better investment.

 

@blackshark

Individually each person reducing their energy usage by even a small percentage may not not seem like it achieves much but if everyone does so then that energy usage amount overall is going to make a bigger difference overall.

My main energy usage comes from heating hot water, the oven and heating during the winter months. All my lighting uses energy efficient bulbs and my PC uses high efficiency low energy components and when not in use is switched off completely.

I agree that insulation and other forms of energy conservation can be more productive and no doubt in the long term also more cost effective but surely a big part of this is also about educating people as a whole to their own usage, what the options and costs are what that costs them. Once people tend to realise a little effort and investment can save them money they usually tend to sit up and start to take notice.

There are of course always going to be people out there with more money than sense and I would love to see all the homes in the UK with properly insulated lofts and cavity walls, solar tiles (not eye sore panels) on south facing roofs of the house, shed, garage and even miniaturised wind turbines based on the newer design rather than the 2 or 3 bladed turbines out there.

Just consider how much more people do with recycling now and a lot of councils have made this easier with green bins etc and I have cut my waste down to 25% of what it was and once I get a composter will be able to cut it down further still.

 

I believe an electric oven is somewhere around 3000 W when it's on, although it's on a thermostat so the element is probably not on continuously. That would be an interesting test.

For some reason it is never advertised with the product.....

 

You know, i like people who build a super-low power media PC, and then connect it to a CCFL LCD TV, which eats 200-400W constantly, all the time it is turned on. And then say how inefficient plasma TV's are, which sure, some eat 400-500W while watching ice hockey. But also 80-100W when you are watching a dark movie/horror/night scene in thriller.

 

I´m not really surprised, I did borrow a "cost-meter" six months ago, and came to the same - surprising - result: It´s absolutely nothing to worry about, even with an old/powerful/both PC. That´s not what´s making your electricity bill go berserk. Not at all. Nice to know.

 

I did a similar thing when building this current PC of mine. Even though the PC was comparatively low usage, I was surprised to see dear old Steam adding 12w when idle on the desktop, and then another 30w on top when playing a Source engined game. To be fair though, that was nothing compared to Crysis and Cod 4. I balance it out by borrowing a laptop as often as I can, since that's 50W to charge for a couple of hours then nothing to use.

After the kettle and shower which are 2.2Kw but only used in short bursts, and the iron at 1.5Kw peak, Halogen is the big guzzler in my flat, the oven's 1.2Kw, and the heating 800W at a time/400 per bar. So I don't overcook and burn anything because it's costing money as well as wasting food! If the desktop PC uses 10% of the oven, then that's the best I can do until I build an A3850 for just web and streaming stuff.

 

I donno if someone mentioned this before but there is also another way to reduce on that 41p. The HDD Media Players, they consumes very less power & doesn't require much time to boot up & saves space too & the best part is that they come cheap too.