Having just read the piglet power down blog? and just recieved an extortionate power bill, I thought i would attack the problem scientifically
I too have a lot of kit, ignoring the details , at least 4 machines running 24*7 + peripherals and interconnect. So i have embarked on a dangerous (do not do this yourself) yet scienticfic voyage to assertain the power consumption of my kit
? So starting with with my Debian box (old Dell piii 800 optimax, NO monitor / keyboard etc),
Shut the box down, take the top of the plug, remove the fuse, connect Digital Multimeter across the fuse holder, (now for the dangerous bit) power back up
and i was surprise at how little current the box consumes
200mA at 240V during boot up
150mA at 240V once fully booted
now for the maths
using the running figiure of 150mA at 240V that is 36 Watts
Electricity is priced per Kilo watt hour, so 1000 / 36 = 27.777 hr run time on 1 KWh
with a teir2 KWh costing 6.660p (INC VAT) that makes 5.66p per day
assuming 90 days a quarter, that is ??5.10 per qtr for my debian
Allowing approx ??350 quid to build a Mini ITX box, that what reduce the power by about 50%, I calculate the payback time is 35 years,
DOH !!!!
and then add the grief of trying to sneak all the new hardware in past the missus !
?
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That’s interesting. I think you could get a mini-itx for less than ??350 though, but even so, that’s a long payback. I might repeat the dangerous experiment here (I’m qualified to to potentially dangerous things with electricity…..) and see what my total 24/7 PC load is.
I have an interesting scheme for new hardware: exchnage. I have to limit myself to ‘new box in, old one out’ these days.
I’ve had a crack with an old llaptop I rescued, but it’s bost, by the looks of things :-(.
Just been and priced a mini itx system at http://linitx.com/ and built a reasonable system for ??245,which make pay back? 24 years !!
? ??53.35 VIA EPIA 5000 Eden Mainboard
? ??53.90 Case, Venus 669 – Silver
? ??52.55 Kingston Low Profile 512MB PC133 SDRAM
? ??47.30 120 GB Seagate Barracuda 7200 RPM 8MB Cache – ST3120026A
??207.10 +vat
??243.34 in total ! 🙁
That’s a heap of cash compared to the typical home server PC. One of mine was built from new and cost about 200 quid, but the blog server and firewall were freebie rescued-from-the-skip PCs.