[mythtv-users] Power bill vs SchedulesDirect bill

[Dennis Lou]

From: Yan Seiner <yan at seiner.com>
>I agree...  It astounds me that people continue to spend time on this. 
>SD right now costs about $0.08/day.  (My math could be off by a bit, but 
>it's close.)  That's nothing.  I'd say most of us wouldn't stop to pick 
>up 8 pennies in the street.  Heck, most stores have a penny box where 
>people throw their pennies.

Since you bring up numbers, let's have some fun with this.

If I'm not mistaken Tivo uses ~30-45Watts (a friend measured his hacked 2 drive S1 Tivo at 55W) so let's very conservatively say that a monolithic MythTV box uses 50W.  50W*24hr/day*30day/mo = 3.6KW-hrs per month.  Grid power is very roughly about 10cents per KW-hr meaning your Myth box sucks $3.60/month in electricity.  So unless you've got a solar array on your roof or windmill in your yard you are currently paying about 1.5x to feed the MythTV box power vs. feeding it data.

If SD hits $20/yr, then it will go to 2.2x.

However, I have a feeling most MythTV boxes are quite a bit more than 50W.  Let's say it's closer to 80W, in which case it's more like $5.76/month for power (vs. the proposed $1.66/mo for SD data).  Then there are those of you who use multiple backends... :-)

Please don't read anything into what I am saying.  I'm not editorializing, I'm just playing with math :-)

-Dennis




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