Categories: all aviation Building a Biplane bicycle gadgets misc motorcycle theater
I passed a milestone today. Everything* is moved back into the house. Of course, it's basically still all sitting around in boxes, but progress is progress! At least I won't have to be making a bunch more trips out to the storage unit.
* Of course not everything. I'm selling my old wardrobe, and rather than move it to my house, I'll leave it in storage until it sells -- for free if necessary.
It'll be nice to get out of the $171/mo storage payment. Soon, yes, soon.
Posted at 20:32 permanent link category: /misc
Adventures in watts (warning, probably boring)
A while ago, I got a Kill-A-Watt, which is this little box you plug inbetween the wall outlet and a device, to see how much power it uses. I played with it a bit, discovering that my computer uses about 18W while just dinking around like I am now, or up to 45W while doing processor-intensive tasks like rendering video.
Now that I'm back in my house, I'm thinking about my electric bill, which has historically been pretty high. I was running as many as 5 or 6 full-size computers, plus some networking equipment. Each of those computers had a 250-350W power supply, although I doubt they were drawing that amount the whole time (but maybe they were...).
When I moved out to sell the house, I made the executive decision that maintaining computers at home was far too much like maintaining computers at work. I didn't want anything more to do with it. Thus you see the much faster speeds for obairlann.net that exist today, as I let Dreamhost take over the hosting. An added advantage is that I don't have the relatively humongous electrical load I had before.
Out of curiosity, I went around, Kill-A-Watting some New House Order devices. For computers, I now have the laptop, the DSL modem, a wireless router, and an external hard drive. The laptop, as I've already mentioned, runs about 18W normally, or 2W when sleeping and keeping the battery topped up. The wireless router, I was pleased to see (a WRT54G, for those keeping score at home) runs 2W total, ever. The DSL modem similarly runs 2W. The external hard drive uses 4W while standing by, or 12W while accessing the hard drive (it normally spins down, so average consumption will be 4.1W or something, based on how often I access it). So, the grand total computer power in the house is now an average of about 25W, since the laptop spends about 40% of its time awake, and 60% sleeping. That's a pretty sizeable jump from the 6 x 200W (not to mention monitors) I was running before, plus networking gear.
Of course, all is not rosy on this path. My TV system, although off 99% of the time, is horrible: a projector which uses 290W while on, and a surprising 4W just to sit in standby. The stereo stack (which includes amplifier, MD player, CD player, VCR, and PS2) uses about 11W on standby, including a 2W drain for the plug-in clock. That drops by about 2W per device that I unplug (most of this stuff stays in a standby mode to respond to a remote control). Switched on and playing a CD at a comfortable volume, the system uses about 80W, although it varies depending on how much noise comes out of the speakers. Listening to the radio at the same volume uses maybe 2W less.
The stack jumps up to about 104W while playing a DVD through the PS2 -- a dedicated DVD player would probably draw less power, since the PS2 includes a lot of fancy (and power hungry) electronics to make video games pretty. Interestingly, playing a video game only draws a little bit more, at 109W.
Fortunately, the stereo system is one which is only on a small amount of the time, and I only turn on the bits that are being used.
Charging things take a surprising amount of power, but not how you think. I checked a couple wall-wart power supplies, and they clocked in at about 2W each, while doing nothing but being plugged in. Of course, their draw goes up once they're powering their intended devices, depending on the device. The problem with the wall-warts is that they draw power whether they're doing anything or not, and many of them end up just plugged in by default, drawing power and doing nothing.
I haven't measured everything, but it looks like my normal "standby" power is under 100W. That's far better than it used to be, but 100W still adds up to 2.4 kWh per day. For that power, I have clocks, computer equipment, and other "always on" devices to thank.
For all that ~400W sounds bad to watch a DVD, I only do that about two hours every few days, for (let's call it) 4.8 kWh per month. On the other hand, the standby power for those systems (15W) is on 24/7, for 10.8 kWh per month. Yeehaw! I think I'll start switching off that power strip...
This leads to the question, "How much does it all cost?" My 2-monthly electric bill reveals the answers. It says the summer rate for power is 3.76 cents per kWh, and that for the 62 days ending July 10th, I averaged 4.43 kWh per day. Since I have a "base service charge" of $6, my actual cost per day for that period was 26 cents per day. Of course, for the same period last year (computers and all running), I was averaging 17.55 kWh/day. Last year, my average power bill was around $70 for two months, and this last July's bill is $16.37.
Hooray for less power usage! Now, how do I reduce it further?
Posted at 13:53 permanent link category: /misc
Categories: all aviation Building a Biplane bicycle gadgets misc motorcycle theater