[mythtv-users] Requesting some sample kill a watt meter numbers

[Michael T. Dean]

  On 01/17/2011 12:58 PM, Calvin Harrigan wrote:
> On 1/17/2011 12:29 PM, Joe Hickey wrote:
>> So lately I've noticed my power bill has been high.... or at least
>> higher than I think it should be based on the amount of stuff in our
>> small apartment.  So I finally broke out the kill a watt meter and
>> started measuring my various equipment.
>>
>> Turns out my combined be/fe is burning 85 watts at idle.... not good!
>>   I'd like to address that, but I'm hoping first to get some real-world
>> usage samples to gauge what I could actually save.  I was thinking
>> about a mini-ITX motherboard, paired with the most efficient PSU I can
>> find.  The best choice for CPU is still pretty vague to me right now.
>>
>> Has anyone built a similar backend lately (who also owns a kill a
>> watt) and would you be willing to share your power usage?
>>
>> What I'm particularly interested in is the real-world power usage
>> difference between a very low power cpu, such as via C7/nano, to the
>> atom-based boards, to a system based on a real processor with enough
>> power to do commflagging jobs.  A sheevaplug crossed my mind as well,
>> but seems like this is so low power that even the scheduler/mysql
>> tasks can bog it down, and I don't like the idea of having all my
>> storage go through a USB bottleneck.
>
> I'd imagine that your utility rates probably have just gone up.  But 
> that aside if you live in the US you're paying 8-15 cents per kwh.  
> Lets say it's 10 for easy math.  If you PC is running 24/7 that's  
> (0.085 kwh * 24 * 365) * .10 about $75 a year.  Even if assuming that 
> the newer hardware draws no power, the price of the new hardware will 
> take a few years to make back. If you are saving half the power, it'll 
> take twice as long to recoup. If it's a green thing, think of all the 
> power and resources that it would take to make that fancy new low 
> power box. Green and saving money on power is all good, but you have 
> to take a good look at it from all sides.  Why not just run the box 
> when it needs to run?  I.e.  When it's recording and while your using 
> it.  Mythshutdown works pretty good, though it depends on a bios that 
> can be set to wake the machine up.

Yes.  Shutting down the system when not in use is the /best/ way to save 
power, by far.  And, since MythTV now supports the master backend's 
shutting down remote backends when not required, and still supports the 
master backend being shut down and waked with alarm through 
mythshutdown, there's never been a better time to take this approach.

See, also, 
http://www.gossamer-threads.com/lists/mythtv/users/448321#448321 for my 
manifesto on why.

Mike