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

[Mark D. Montgomery II]

Quoting Calvin Harrigan <charriglists at bellsouth.net>:

> On 1/17/2011 12:29 PM, Joe Hickey wrote:
>> Hi all!
>>
>> 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'm planning to redo the power layout in my room tonight (new power  
strips to clean everything up, yay), so I'll try to remember to hook  
my Kill-A-Watt up line with my mythbox to see what it's pulling.
One thing to consider (which I don't have solid data on, just  
comments) is a high efficiency power supply in your machine.  I've  
read they tend to make a fair bit of difference in the power  usage.   
I've been putting the Antec earthWatts 80+ PSUs in all my builds the  
past year or so.

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