This Christmas, I requested and received something that many of you will find highly nerdy and not all that interesting: an electrical power meter. I have long wondered just how much various items around the house use (home electronics, mainly) and I now have a way to measure and see for myself.
First up, the computer. Instead of shutting my computer (iMac G5) down every time I am done using it, I put it into "sleep" mode. The display turns off, the disks spin down and the computer appears to be off except for a pulsing heart-beat-like light below the display. Power consumed in this state: 9W. Considering most house-hold incandescent lamps are 60W or greater, this is not much power at all. Overnight in the state, my computer consumed 0.08 kW-hrs. Even at $0.10/kW-hr, this is only pennies a month to avoid the hassle of shutting down and restarting my computer every time I want to use it.
Other misc. measurements I made on the computer:
-The display can be set to turn off after a period of disuse. The display consumes about 15W at full brightness. This is a lot less than I expected considering...
-During my normal usage, my computer consumes about 70W. This varies quite a bit depending on what I'm doing but the normal email, web-surfing, typing all weigh in about the same.
-When I'm doing processor intensive work like photo-editing or DVD-rendering the computer consumes about 110W.
I'll be measuring other stuff and probably (maybe) post on it later but I'll leave you with this one highly practical tidbit: those compact florescent lamps REALLY DO use a lot less energy than incandescent bulbs. The ones I've measured have all met their advertised power consumption. These light sources consume only 14W and provide the light of a 60W incandescent. Do us all a favor and go out and get yourself some of these for all the high-usage areas of your home. They'll probably pay for themselves over the life of the bulb and provide the warm fuzzy that you get when you save energy.
Well, at least I do.
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