Energy Monitor

I got a similar item from Maplin a couple of months ago and they were in the sale at £13 but they are £26 now . They keep on putting things in the sale and taking them out so it might be worth signing up for the e-mail if your not in a hurry for one . When I was testing it seemed good , showed a drop in wattage when I switched of me speakers and a huge drop when I switched of me monitor . Been testing me fridge freezer and its showing 620 hours runtime , 26.41 KWHours and using 77 watts . Good job you reminded me about it as it could have been running forever . I'm going to do a 12 hour pc test with it running Bionic and a 12 hour test without Bionic to see what the difference is . :D
 
Im interested to know how many units a PC uses on idle, with no monitor or speakers or anything.
 
If you have a voltmeter, set it to current then connect the leads in series with the live side of the mains.

How you do that, safely, is up to you ;)

This will show you the current being drawn and then using ohms law with 240V AC as the voltage figure, you can work out the watts.

And no, I can't remember how you do that, I'm not a student anymore and it's only at that learning time is it worth knowing :D

I'd guess a base unit with a floppy, two optical drives and two hard drives would draw about 1 to 2 amps on idle but I honestly have no idea if that's accurate.
 
christopherpostill said:
Im interested to know how many units a PC uses on idle, with no monitor or speakers or anything.
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No two PCs will be the same ... ;)

There is at least two important variables at work ... what you pay for your electric, I know I pay less than you without askin who you are with ... and the Wattage of all the components inside your PC.

Using such things as Cool-n-Quiet can help reduce the Watts, good use of power management can help also ... turning off HDs & other peripherals ain't my cup of tea.

Investing in one of them thingymebob gadgets may be the only real way of knowing how much power your kit is eating. :D


Ask Ian if he can supply all us Mods with one of them Power & Energy monitors, we can then do a review for all. :lol:
 
Using a meter like the one chris linked to .
I pluged in to the mains 2 x 4 socket anti surge strips (needed them for all the plugs ) and the meter reding was ,
3 watts,

Then I plugged in,

Linskys 4 port router (on) - 6 watts
Bt 190 Voyager (on) -12 watts
PC - switch on psu off - 13 watts
PC - switch on psu on - 16 watts
Monitor (off) - 25 watts
Speakers (on) - 30 watts
Monitor on standby - 31 watts
PC + Bionic - 230 watts
PC no Bionic - 194 watts
PC + speakers off - 185 watts
PC + speakers off and monitor off - 115 watts
PC + speakers off + monitor unpluged -109 watts


Is that any help to you chris , thats all done on my pc below by the way .

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Great little insight there Abarbarian ... thanks. :nod:



Now for some 'mucks' deductions ...

Anything that is plugged in, consumes power.

Looks like you only need a 250/300 PSU then.

Better use less light bulbs to compensate.

... it's elementary my dear Watt'son


:lol:
 
If I have the monitor switched off when doing some decodeing for example I save a whopping 70 watts and unplugging or switching off at the mains saves another 10 watts thats 80 watts in total . so roughly every 12 hours of monitor use equals 1 KWH at approximately 16p per KWH thats 32p every 24 hours or £3.64 for a full 24/7 week . Swich off the speakers and it rises to about £4.00 per week . Now let me see if I choose the right pub and the right time of day thats about 2 pints of fab real ale . Well worth flicking a switch or two for . :p
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I'm quite curious now, may get one of these myself....
 
Aha, readings, good stuff, Abarbarian.

240 watts with 240 volts = 1 amp, btw, so I wuz right :D

1 amp, believe it or not, is quite a lot of current and will make a significant change to your electric bill.

When I crunched three or four machines 24/7 my quarterly electric bill has been as high as £240.00.

Now I only let the machines crunch when they're being used, it's around £140.00

Quite a difference eh? Although I probably used to save on home heating costs ;)
 
I might get myself one of these too... they look good.

Mum was moaning at me for leaving my computer on overnight... i'm sure it costs nothing at all...!
 
christopherpostill said:
I might get myself one of these too... they look good.

Mum was moaning at me for leaving my computer on overnight... i'm sure it costs nothing at all...!
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Left mine on for 24.30 hours and its used 4.58KWH thats half at 50%cpu and half at 100%cpu . At 14p per KWH thats 63p for the day ,£4.41 for the week, and £1609.65 for the year if me maths is right . So your mums right , aren't they always .
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:D
 
Abarbarian said:
Left mine on for 24.30 hours and its used 4.58KWH thats half at 50%cpu and half at 100%cpu . At 14p per KWH thats 63p for the day ,£4.41 for the week, and £1609.65 for the year if me maths is right . So your mums right , aren't they always .
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:D
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No, your maths ain't right :lol:

£4.41 a week = £229.32 a year, not sixteen hundred odd quid :D

Ner ner, ner ner :p
 
Goofed again . Multiplied £4.41 x 365 instead of 63p x 365 , thought it looked a bit steep .
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189 hours run time 33.01 KWH . Thats roughly 8 days at £0.15 per KWH thats roughly £5.00 . Thats with Boinc running about 75% of the time and with me monitor and speakers switched off at night and for some of the day aswell .
Less than £5 for 24/7 entertainment ain't bad in my book and some of that is going to a good cause and I'm not out on the street mugging grannies . :thumb::D
 
Just been reading this thread at the OCUK forums, He used one of the above Energy monitors and tested his system.

The rig in his sig is, Intel C2D E6600 @ 3.4Ghz | GeIL 2GB PC6400 | P5B Dlx 1101 Bios | ATi HD2900XT 512MB | Hiper Type-R 580w | X-Fi Extreme Gamer. Two 7200rpm HD's and 2 DVDRW/CDRW drives along with around 4 case fans.

Considering the HD2900XT's are supposed to be rather power hungary i was quite supprised at the result.

Ok the 3D Mark results are in, the power usage remained between 370-400w the highest it peaked was 400w and it only stayed there for a split second this was on Canyon Flight and in the cpu tests the power usage remained around 350w. Im fairly suprised and I will do more tests with various different games to see how it affects the power usage. All in all 400w is impressive, just shows you can most likely get away with a 2900xt on a 450w with decent railage and still have a nicely oced C2D.
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OK have redone the test this time I let Orthos stress in the background, both cores at 100%, this did not increase the power usage massively, the power usage this time peaked at 428w and once again this was in canyon flight and only stayed there for a few seconds, canyon flight seems to be the most intensive, on all other tests the power usage stayed aroud 410-420w. Once again pretty impressive. Will be trying other games to get a better idea. Either way I now know I have a nice Oc'ing headroom for the XT for when I decide to do so (Whenever ATi tool is compatible)
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What do you all think?
 
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V_R said:
What a response!
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Nothing really new to me ... maybe of use to all 'mommies & daddies' who tell you to turn off that light you left on. :D


;)
 
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