Saving Power in your Home Office 285
cweditor writes "Rob Mitchell shows how he measured energy use of all his home office equipment, and then targeted the energy pigs for replacement. With better equipment choices, he'd save $90/year. If you've got more than a couple of computers and printers at home (and if you're a Slashdot reader, you probably do), the savings would be a lot higher. Includes detailed formulas as well as a spreadsheet on monitor energy usage."
Larger scale (Score:3, Informative)
Kill-A-Watt and "80 Plus" (Score:5, Informative)
Only $90/year???? (Score:5, Informative)
you didn't read the FA? (Score:3, Informative)
But i agree, he probably spent 5x more to save $90.
Re:love to see more of this (Score:3, Informative)
Then compare that to the estimated reduction of your energy bill over the lifetime of the item.
If that LCD costs $100 but saves you $90 a year, then you will break even after about 2 years and start saving energy (and the Planet).
Re:False economy (Score:4, Informative)
Where I live, electricity is about twice as expensive as natural gas for heating, so heating with waste heat is not quite as economical as one would think. Plus it's an extra liability in cooling season. But when I heated with resistive electric in an apartment, I too didn't worry too much about leaving things on in the wintertime.
Compact fluorescents (Score:4, Informative)
Watts vs. VA (Score:4, Informative)
There's a short explanation of the difference here: http://www.powervar.com/Eng/ABCs/CalcVAWATTS.asp [powervar.com]
Re:Saving elsewhere (Score:3, Informative)
Anytime some one says "Oh my is broken", I've probably got a replacement and I simply give the part away. I admit that having a bunch of computers running 'just because' is probably wasteful in terms of electricity cost, but throwing them out is wasteful if they're just going to sit in a landfill.
I just got one of those... (Score:4, Informative)
After seeing these numbers, I decided to check out my wifes machine. Her system has the known Windows bug that makes it go to the "It is safe to shut down your system" message instead of actually shutting down when the computer is instructed to shut down. This combined with her usage pattern of sitting down and looking things up for 5 minutes, then walking away for the computer, and coming back 2 or 3 hours later to spend another 5 or 10 minutes on the system, means that getting her to turn off her computer when not in use is simply not an option. There is no way I am going to convince her to wait the 3-4 minutes waiting for it to boot up, and another 3-4 minutes waiting for it to shut down, to get 5 minutes of use out of it. Her machine runs at 110 watts idle, and 150 watts under normal load. Given that the new motherboard has suspend that actually works, 99% of the time her system could be running 5 watts with, again, better functionality. This would lead to a savings of $22.25 per month in savings. This would mean giving her the same upgrade would pay for itself in ~7 months. You can bet I am going to do that very soon. I expect that my son's system is only slightly more efficient than my wifes, so his will likely follow shortly after.
Refrigerators & Freezers in the Garage!!!! (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Sensible (Score:4, Informative)
Additionally, I have a radio remote controlled master power button, to which I've connected all monitors, speakers, chargers, and everything else non-essential for running the computer. This makes it easy to kill all power while still leaving the computer on. A bit more power could perhaps be saved by using an even better power supply, but not buying it will probably save more money and environment.
Re:90 whole dollars (Score:4, Informative)
My next $5 will be spent on a timer for my overly large tv, satellite box, surround sound system, (leaving the TiVo intact for late night recording)etc. to kill standby mode on that stuff as well. I am saving more passively than the guy is actively managing his power.
Re:Saving elsewhere (Score:5, Informative)
No. A full load in the dishwasher actually uses less resources than doing dishes by hand. And the dishwasher will actually clean and disinfect the dishes properly, whereas most people doing dishes by hand won't actually kill all the bacteria while using at least twice as much water.
replace things on its own time (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Saving elsewhere (Score:3, Informative)
EX: I had a 91' Volvo with ~230k miles which I replaced a few months ago with a brand new Acura TSX. The Acura get's ~50% more miles to the gallon but costs 500$ month. If it had cost 700$ a month I would have probably kept my Volvo for another few years because I don't drive all that much.
PS: Yea the car analogy is messed up because there are several reasons to buy a new car. However, when things cost more the tendency is to stick with what you have.
Re:love to see more of this (Score:4, Informative)
There is more to the question than just gas savings. Repairs and routine maintenance are another part as well as resale value. My wife and I both bought used cars in 2003. We both bought 2002 vehicles for $18,000. Hers has 80,000 miles and mine has 101,000 miles.
Let's check current bluebook...
2002 Dodge Caravan Roughly $6-8,000
http://www.cars.com/go/crp/research.jsp;jsessionid=JOG2KH0OBPGX1LAYIESU2UY?makeid=12&modelid=127&year=2002§ion=summary&mode=&aff=national [cars.com]
2002 Toyota Prius Roughly $16-17,000
http://www.cars.com/go/crp/research.jsp?makeid=47&modelid=2916&year=2002§ion=summary&mode=&aff=national [cars.com]
The Dodge has already needed a brake pad replacement, power steering service and other items. The Prius has no engine belts except for the AC. The power steering is electric, not hydraulic. I had the brakes checked at 80,000 miles when I changed tires. There was 80% remaining due to the use of regenerative braking.
Just from the above, it is easy to see which is the winner on value.. and we haven't touched gas cost yet.. OK what about the gas?
I bought the Prius used with 8,000 miles, so I have put on 101,000 - 8,000 or 93,000 miles since I bought it. Gas went from about 1.50 a gal to over $3.00 a gal. For sake of argument, lets use the average of about $2.25/gallon. I have averaged 46 MPG. I bought approximately 2,022 gallons for a cost of approximately $4,550. On the other hand the gas for the Caravan is over $10,000 spent. At over $3.00/gallon, the savings are more dramatic. For the same distance driven it is either a $30 fill-up or $70.
People often argued that the cost savings in gas will not pay for the premium for buying a hybrid. If you drive a car that gets less than 1/2 that of the Prius and you drive it more than 100,000 miles, and you can still get gas for $2.25/gallon, then the argument is almost valid as this is the break even point on the additional price premium.
I bought the car when the price of gas wasn't over $2.00/gallon. I studied them and found they are not new tech. They were on the road for 5 years in Japan before they hit the US market in 2001. I was impressed with the reliability and the elimination of most of the expensive over 100,000 mile failure items. Items like alternators, power steering pumps, hoses, starters and the like are eliminated. I also knew gas prices were going up and were never returning to under $1.00/gallon. Future gas prices meant future savings. A surprise was just how high the resale value is. That is an added bonus.
One of the big scares of buying a hybrid was that big expensive battery. It is common knowledge batteries are useless after about 3 years in your cell phone, laptop, etc. I'm going to have to buy a $5,000 battery in 3 years... there is no savings as gas savings will need to be spent on a battery every 3 years. Part of my studies was to deal with just this fact. In digging I found the truth, and it's very nice and was the final item that got me to buy one.
Here is the deal on the batteries... Cell phones, laptops and such deep cycle batteries.. BAD. You run them down past 50% and charge them up to the top.. Bad and bad.
The hybrid keeps the battery under 80% and over 50% with almost no exc
lights (Score:3, Informative)
Then again, I still use some of those really inefficient halogen touchier lamps. I use CFL bulbs in the light fixtures that don't dim, but there's something really nice about being able to vary the light from intense and white for reading to warm and dim for movies or dinner.
While halogen lights are not as efficient as CFLs they are more efficient than incandescent lights. As for using CFLs with dimmer switches, there are some CFLs capable of dimming. Though they are more expensive here are some dimmable CFLs [baybulbs.com]. Though I don't see where they say what the manufacturer is on that page both GE and Philips make dimmable CFLs.
FalconSaving energy is easy... just do it! (Score:4, Informative)
We are a small IT company in Colorado that has always had a thing for saving energy. To all you "green" folks out there, no, we did not do it to reduce our "carbon footprint" or any such psudo-math. (I will retract this statement if and when someone can show me hard math and facts where the data doesn't come from a table generated by an "expert"). We simply saw the need to reduce waste, and did what we could. The fact it would help our bottom line didn't hurt either
Recently we moved into our own building, and got a real power bill. The first one doesn't count since we had the deposit to pay and contractors with power hungry tools... but our second one was $37, and no, that is not a typo. The subsequent bills were within 20%. What was done to make this possible was three-fold, Habits, Building, and Equipment.
Change your habits. If you are done with something, turn it off. We power down half the servers and some IT gear when we leave for the night. Laptops get turned off or leave with the employee. Lights get turned off when you are not using the space. These habits were solidified in the old location.
The building we selected is a 1920's adobe with about 2200 square feet. At our altitude (nearly 7000 feet), we needed no cooling except for the hottest months. The rest of the time we pull cool air from under the wood floors as needed. The office stayed at about 70 degrees, and the A/C kicks in at 85. All the area lights have been replaced with compact flourescent and task lights are LED spots. The break room has a small energy efficient fridge and microwave. No real surprises there, but the big savings is in the IT side of the house.
Most of our real power consumption on the AC side are the printers. We have 3 laser printers, 2 B/W and 1 color, that we keep turned off when not in use. I wish we could move to something more energy efficient, but in business, there is still no replacement for a laser printer. We also have an inkjet/fax/scanner/dishwasher combo (just kidding about the dishwasher bit), but it also runs on AC, and stays on nearly all the time. We use it mostly to print proofs before they go to the laser printers for production.
We have 8 pieces of non-computer equipment (phone systems, routers etc...) that run on 12 VDC and 3 run on 5vdc. We selected the equipment because it ran on DC at one of these voltages. Wall warts are just miniaturized linear power supplies; they draw power whenever they are plugged in, and produce heat, even when they are doing nothing for you. Switch mode supplies, such as PC power supplies use power in proportion to their demand and are most efficient at 70-80% load. We use a 500W dual output switch mode power supply to power everything that normally has a wall wart, charge the battery banks for failover... sort of a UPS with an 24 hour run time, and all the servers.
Waitaminute... Servers??? Yep. While you may think you need God's own server for what you do, take a real look at it. We had a file server, 2 web servers, a mail server, an applications server, a database server, and a development server. They were mostly dual P4s with one single CPU. We replaced the servers used for the file and mail servers with one box with a Via C3 processor, 200W 12vdc power supply (for ITX machines), dual 500GB hard disks and 2 GB RAM running CentOS. It is plenty fast for our work group of 4 office people, 4 techs, and 2 sales weenies. In fact most have commented that it "feels faster" than our old SMP machine running 2000 Server. Better still is the power consumption... about 3.5 amps on the 12V line, or 42 Watts. Nearly identical machines run as our web servers, a combined application and database serve
Dishwashers are a win, not a loss (Score:4, Informative)
But yes, overall, simplifying our lives and living situations would go a long way towards reducing our energy footprint; but we should also avoid false optimizations.
Re:240 volts (Score:3, Informative)
I look for the new 80 Plus rating whenever I buy a new power supply for a computer. The 80 PLUS performance specification requires power supplies in computers to be 80% or greater energy efficient at 20%, 50% and 100% of rated load. Many computers come with much less efficient power supplies. I used an 80 Plus rated power supply in the most recent computer that I built. On my slightly older computer, the power supply recently died and I replaced it with an 80 Plus rated power supply.
Another problem is the energy consumption of inefficient auxiliary equipment with transformers which consume power even when the device is off. Those cheap poorly designed external transformers are sometimes called "vampire taps." The Smart Strip Power Strip could probably help there. When the Smart Strip senses that you've turned your computer off, it automatically shuts off your peripherals, too, preventing them from drawing an idle current. It does that by sensing the flow of electrical current through the strip's control outlet.
By the way, I live in the U.S., where we use 120 volts.
What is 80 PLUS [80plus.org]
Smart Strip Power Strip [smarthomeusa.com]
Re:Saving elsewhere (Score:3, Informative)
Dad's Computer
Mom's Computer
Kids Computers
Dad's printer - Laser
Mom's Printer - Scanner/Injet
Kids Printer - injet
and that's just in my house. Dad's printer is used for work, Mom's is an all-in-one and the kids get basic injet for school work, while ensuring when they run out of ink/paper, it's doesn't mean dad's out.
Add in a home network and I've now got all three desktops Folding 24/7
This of course doesn't count the Media Center (don't have one anyhow) the fact that there's a home NAS, Dad/Mom/Kids all have backup folders on them. Plus doesn't include the game consoles, Gaming Rig, and so on. All told, there are 7 computers in my house running 24/7 for a total of 5 people (3 pre-teens).
Now if you asked are they in use all the time then Hell Yes - Folding at Home on all of them and every system is as energy saving as possible.
Re:Saving elsewhere (Score:3, Informative)
Not mine. Used to when it was new, but not lately. Have to rewash things constantly which leads to more resources being used (including time). And before you start, its only 6 years old and I don;t thing replacing all our dishwashers every 5 years is efficient use of resources either.
Re:love to see more of this (Score:3, Informative)
You haven't been paying attention and it shows.
http://www.fueleconomy.gov/feg/hybrid_news.shtml [fueleconomy.gov]
Toyota in addition to the Prius has the Highlander and Camry.
Thanks for the info--it was this kind of post I was hoping for.
You are welcome.