Saving Electricity and Money
My electric bill has been skyrocketing. It’s currently around $90 and I’m dangerously close to passing the $100 mark. I’ve really started to become conscious about how power my computers are drawing. I had 3 machines that would run for 24/7. My desktop machine has a Pentium D processor, which draws 177 watts at idle! That’s not including the inefficiency of the power supply, or any of the other components. It’s easily drawing 200-250+ watts when it’s idle. The same goes for my other 2 servers.
Because of my electric bill, I’ve been disparately trying to figure out how to significantly reduce this bill. Here is the plan I put into action:
- Set my desktop to sleep if not used for an hour. This also means I have to shut down the programs that may keep it from going to sleep. If I need to wake up the machine remotely, I use a wake-on-LAN client. It sends a “magic packet” to the network card, and wakes the computer up.
- Consolidate the 2 servers into one. The second server was running cruise control to do continuous builds. I used the VMware converter to turn the physical machine into a virtual machine. It now runs on my Ubuntu VMware server. I can now sell that machine if I want.
- Try not to charge my laptop at home. I read that charging a laptop can use around 50-80 watts of power. Obviously if I need to charge it I do, but if I’m somewhere else, I’d prefer to use their power if they’re offering it for free.
I figure just doing this alone will save 66%+ of my power usage from the computers.
I did also look into the following:
- Use laptops - Laptops tend to draw around 15watts at idle. Unfortunately, no matter how I did the math, it would cost more to purchase the laptops than the money they would save. If I do need to buy a new computer, I will have to seriously consider this again.
- Get Mac minis or some other low power usage machine - This solution is cheaper than the laptop idea (or maybe about the same), except with more power draw. The numbers still don’t work.