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

[Calvin Harrigan]

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.
> _______________________________________________
> mythtv-users mailing list
> mythtv-users at mythtv.org
> http://mythtv.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/mythtv-users
>

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.

Calvin