Power usage

Steve Kilbride Freebeer at rogers.com
Sun Aug 10 00:29:10 UTC 2008


At 08:00 AM 8/9/2008, you wrote:
>My confuser is 300 Watts, lets say I go for a 3-5 watt one - I can run
>it for 60 hours to consume what the 300 watt one will do in one hour.
>Last month I used about 1.67 Million Watt Hours doing upgrades, on 7.10
>and 8.04 and 7.10 rc in the same amount of time. With a low power
>computer that figure might have been 27,833 Watt Hours, is that a bit of
>a dent? In Ontario, this politician Mike H. Sold off Hydro to private
>companies. They now have a delivery Charge. Bringing hydro to you. It's
>more than your Electricity usage. I used to use about $9.00 of
>Electricity, but the bill was $92.00 with that delivery and debit
>reduction, and taxes added on! So little by little I'm adding Solar
>Panels, and A-E stuff, and reducing my need for hydro, to save on Solar
>Panel-Battery Costs. Just about all my lights now are LED, not using
>Hydro. With a low Power computer, I can run them on A-E not using hydro!
>So that makes that 27,833 Watt Hours = Zero as far as hydro is
>concerned. That's a bit of a dent! The Solar Panels are a bit expensive,
>as was the windmill and tower, but they pay back in 20 years more than
>they cost! LED lights save about $350.00 each in their life span. They
>don't run on Hydro, don't burn out, make quite a bit of light. 3 Watts
>of LED Warm White light, is equivalent to about 40 watts of Hydro
>Incandescent Light. 540 Watts of outdoor light was replaced with 26
>watts of LED light, that does not use hydro! Windows "whatever" uses
>more Kilowatt Hours, because you need a computer that consumes more.
>Ubuntu can run on this confuser at about 180 Watts instead of 300 Watts.
>7.10 can run on that little computer at about 3 -2 watts it's a bit
>slower, but for most things it's OK! The Stealth one can run the latest
>and greatest OS's but they cost a bit more.
>
>
>Answer your Question?

Not really... what do you base your 300 watts figure on?  The rating 
of the power supply?  If so, then you're misunderstanding 
something.  That 300 watt is a *peak* rating.  I've not actually 
measured my consumption, but a quick google suggests that the average 
power consumption of a desktop machine (box, monitor, etc) consumes 
120 watts of power.  So if you were to run your computer 24/7 at that 
average you'd consume 120w x 24hrs x30days/1000 = 86.4 kwh.  Assuming 
cost of electricity at 7 cents per kwh, total cost is $6.05 cents for 
the month.

LED lights don't run on "Hydro"? (I'm assuming here that you're using 
"Hydro" = "electricity".)  And yes, LEDs do have a lifespan.

Oh.. and I don't consider a payback period of 20 years to be a return 
on investment.


Steve





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