[mythtv-users] Power recording rule for night time preference

Christopher Kerr mythtv at theseekerr.com
Tue Feb 9 05:10:26 UTC 2010


On Tue, Feb 9, 2010 at 1:50 PM, Phill Edwards <philledwards at gmail.com> wrote:
>> I discovered that my PC was the biggest power consumer in the household
>> (actually 70% of my power was consumed by my PC).
>
> How did you work that out? I'd be interested in doing something
> similar to see if my PC is a electricity hog too.

Buy a cheap wattage meter, plug your PC into it. Find one which will
log kW hours rather than just display the current power draw. Leave
for 24 hours, then compare against your home power meter. Calculate a
percentage.

A quick and dirty worst case estimate: Take the rating of your power
supply, and multiply by the number of hours the machine is on - if you
have a 500W power supply, you'll struggle to use more than 12 kilowatt
hours per day - and if you do use that much, you need to look at
cutting down on the cpu load!

A typical number for a combined BE/FE would be around 4-5kW hours per
day. Adding more processor intensive jobs (say, transcoding) might
bring this figure up to 7 or 8kW hours per day. If this constitutes
70% of anyone's power draw, I'd be pretty surprised - unless you have
no fridge.

- Chris


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