I was curious the other day and wanted to know how much it costs per year for some of the electronic devices I have. Maybe someone with a kill-a-watt can tell me if my rule of thumb is remotely accurate. I'm just too cheap to go out and get a kill-a-watt, but I probably should get one. The numbers I ran assuming about an 11cent/kwh gave me the following rule of thumb for devices running 24/7...like myth. <br>
<br>Replace the unit of watts with dollars and that how much it costs to operate the device per year if the device uses that power rating 24/7. So if you have a device that CONSUMES 5W nominally, its costs close to $5/year to operate that device 24/7. If your whole mythbox uses a minimum of 50W, it costs at least $50/year to operate.<br>
<br>I thought it was an interesting how the numbers came out to give me that rule of thumb. <br><br>Obviously you can't rely on power supply wattage ratings of you computer, but when comparing idle wattages between two products, the rule of thumb may come in handy. Obviously some states are higher than others, thats why I call it a rule of thumb. <br>
<br><OT> The reason for the thought process, I'm trying to figure out what my options are for photo and video sharing with family and backup. <br>1. I could poke a hole through the firewall and share them via my mythbackend...but I don't usually worry about security as a whole on that box...<br>
2. Try to find an uber efficient computer to serve up a web page and act as a local file server for that media.<br>3. Pay to use sharing services. I haven't found any free services that offer unlimited storage for this media, and yet allow others to download full res content. Currently I use google picasaweb due to its easy integration with picasa, but I'm constantly having to cycle through and delete albums due to a 1GB limit.<br>
</OT><br>