Saturday, 15 October 2005
Saving Energy
This past summer, my energy provider - Pacific Gas & Electric - ran a promotional program, the"20/20 Summer Savings Program". The program began June 1, and ended September 30th. During those four months, if you were able to reduce your electrical energy consumption by 20% over last year’s totals, PG&E would rebate you 20% of your total electric charges for that period on your October bill. A very smart program. Summer is the highest usage time of the year here in California, due to home and industry air cooling during the hottest periods. By encouraging homeowners to reduce their usage, it helps level the daily peaks somewhat, and reduces demand on power generators (as should be known, power plant capacity has to be built to satisfy peak demand, even if that peak demand interval is only for a small portion of the year, and a small portion of each day during the peaks as well). I went after the rebate wholeheartedly. I had already purchased a "Kill-a-Watt" meter a year ago - a wonderful device that you plug into an outlet, then plug into that whatever you want to measure, and it gives you true kilowatt-hour usage readings. I got mine on ebay - just do a search on Kill-A-Watt and you’ll see plenty of listings. I didn’t reach the 20% goal unfortunately, but did manage to reduce overall consumption by 14%, not half bad when you think about it.
How did i reduce usage?
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1. I used to leave my computer on 24×7. The justification was that since I’m a systems administrator, I need fast access to get online if there’s ever a problem with my servers. Which is true. However, problems with my servers are so rare that the five minutes to wait for my PC to fire up in the middle of the night is of little consequence. I’ve not had an unplanned outage of my servers in a couple of years now. What few emergencies there are are not immediately customer-affecting. My PC alone burns about 155 watts continuously, or about 3.5kWh if left on continuously.
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2. I was running previously - and now that the rebate program is over have resumed - running the Folding@Home client on my computer. I won’t belabor the good that comes from running F@H, suffice to say that I’d encourage others to run it. If you’d like to contribute your work unit results to my team, you can visit My team page for details. However, running the client at maximum usage added a good 20W to 30W continuously to the computer’s power consumption, so for about half the duration of the program, I suspended running it.
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3. My monitor burns about 95W - 110W on average when cranked up to highest contrast. I ran a ‘gamma correction’ program to get the optimal settings, and brought that down to the range 85W to 100W. Not a huge savings, but it helps (it’s a big old 21" CRT). I also set the power savings to kick in a lot sooner - after three minutes idle - so that the monitor will blank more quickly if I step away for a bit. The blanked consumption is a mere 4 watts.
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4. I discovered, much to my dismay, that my ‘home theater’ system burns - when not being used at all - nearly 150 watts! 33 watts are the (gigantic) big screen TV idle current. 19 watts are from the (gigantic) power amp when left on but idle. The TiVO burns 29W continuously, and the Comcast HDTV DVR burns 44W. The remainder is I assume various ‘bits’ of idle current in the UPS, the main audio receiver, etc.. I was able to reduce the usage pretty significantly - put the bigscreen on a hard power switch, so at night when we’re done with the TV, off it goes, completely. We’re leaving the gigantic power amp off almost all the time now - it drives only the subwoofers, and for most TV content it’s just not needed. If we rent a DVD we turn it on. And through most of the summer, almost all the HDTV broadcasts were repeats - so I just left the comcast DVR unplugged. I now have it on a timer, so it comes on in the early evening and goes off in the wee hours of the morning. It needs to be on continuously for at least a few hours every day in order to get guide updates, and of course when watching hi-def content. But otherwise, there’s nothing overnight or during the day for it to record, so off it stays. The TiVO pretty much needs to be on all the time, since there’s a number of programs that are regularly recorded overnight.
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5. I maintain some backup servers in my garage - I have a dedicated high speed internet connection, so I’m able to provide ‘offsite’ backup services for my main business here. I used to have three servers. I was able to consolidate functionality from two of them into one, so that eliminated one whole server. and I also found that instead of the net 6 processors that were running those two servers (4 in one, 2 in the other), I’m able to get by just fine with only *one* cpu in the remaining machine! that saves a LOT of power. The remaining other server, I pulled some of the memory from it that wasn’t needed, and detached a second harddrive that was unused as well. All the equipment there was previously burning 235W continuously, that’s now down to about 130W I believe. That’s really the bulk of where we saved. And the beauty of it is that it’s not a hardship at all. even though we didn’t meet the rebate requirements, we saved about $90 over the four months compared to usage a year ago. Not too shabby.
I think the Kill-a-Watt is a great investment. Really seeing how much power a device is burning can be, uh, illuminating, to employ a bad pun. I recommend getting one if you’re interested in saving both energy and money.
7 Comments »
Tuesday, 18 October 2005
Ed Campbell :
Well, I dropped by to leave a completely different comment, Paul; but, once again, you’re dealing with a topic that I am, as well — in this case, separate from Dvorak Uncensored. So, let me leave that brief note, first.
I really hate giving you or anyone else brief answers — to either comments or questions. That doesn’t do justice to your effort. Though your instant "flames" are something I’m as guilty of — when producing my own comments in our local online newspaper — I ‘m trying to break the habit.
I think we’ll get to a better solution when John sorts out getting a proper threaded forum up and running for the site. For example, though most of what I post on climate change is simply focused on the latest research reaching print, there are an admittedly small number of dissenters in the Climatology community who can give anyone a run for their money. Mike Jorgenson, for example, has made some wrong-headed decisions — like resigning from the peer bodies that he disagrees with [when I think he better serves his cause by staying]; but, he’s capable of providing real paleo-climatic theory to the discussion. I’ve threatened him with being invited over to DU.
Anyway — now that I’m here, I have similar hardware and, since I retired a couple weeks ago, I’ve embarked on the sort of permanent energy-saving campaign that would have warmed my father’s cockles.
I’ve done what you’ve done with the only computer I tended to leave on 24/7. In addition, if you saw Bill Machrone’s column on the same topic a while back — he reminded us that anything that’s warm is probably consuming electricity. All those wee transformers that aren’t driving your printer or scanner or PDA charger base more than 20 minutes a week — still suck up watts. I have a power strip next to the living room couch that is only used for adaptors for my [or my wife's] laptop. When I’m not using the adaptor to recharge or whatever, I turn off the power strip, now, and both adaptors stay cold. Trundling around the house, it looks like I’ve gotten up to $20 a month savings on the bill.
I can’t turn off the HDTiVo because there always seems to be a movie or a "proper" football [soccer] match recording in a country 7 time zones away. Or motorsports in Shanghai, last weekend. The HDTV is a DLP; so, no significant power drain when it’s not in use. And I’ve given away all the CRT monitors over the past several years while converting to LCD screens — including, yes, a 22" monster that used to raise the temp in my wee study about 10 degrees!
Although I have 2 UPS’ + 2 power strips in my study, I now have only essentials on the UPS’ and non-essentials on the power strips — to be turned on when I need to scan or turn on my Windows box for its monthly security updates.
Other ideas? I’m wide open for suggestions. Not so incidentally, this would be another terrific topic for the Forum when it gets cranking.
Paul Theodoropoulos :
Hi Ed,thanks for your comments - and your ‘discretion’ regarding flaming. yes indeed, i can release flaming spittle like nobody’s business elsewhere. i’ve been on the net since 1986 - and i swear, you’d think one would have figured out not to flame people after all this time, but no, i still do it regularly. perhaps it’s a symptom of sitting in front of the monitor 16 hours a day, every day, literally. but i digress.i was rather surprised by the results i got for the ’smaller’ items like wall-wart powered devices. it was a lot less than i thought it would be. most of the wall-warts on devices that weren’t powered up were using barely one watt. those things that were pulling power used hardly more - cordless phone, 3 watts, for example. 3 watts, let’s see - if my math is correct, that means every two weeks, it uses one kilowatt, at a cost of roughly thirteen cents. not much. i don’t have the money for an LCD monitor unfortunately, but i was also surprised at how *much* some of them use. i was looking at one 19" LCD that stated it used 80 watts! i thought the savings were much better than that.yes, the TiVO and similar devices do pose a problem. i found 44 watts to be just too damned much - that’s an awful lot for little more than a spinning harddrive. i guess there’s no solution for that. hazard of a modern life.
Wednesday, 19 October 2005
Ed Campbell :
You must have been in kneepants when you started. Not that I’m joking much about relative ages. I got online in ‘83 — but, not by choice. I was in the middle of career #3 and had just changed firm. The boss called me the day after I was hired and said, "by the way, come down to the regional warehouse and pick up your potable computer!" I said, "pick up my what?"
I still have it in the closet, my Model 100 TRS80 which the company paid $1000 apiece for each of 30-odd wholesale reps. But, if I wanted my commissions [and I did], I had to learn to log into CompuServe and send my daily orders into headquarters in Camarillo, CA.
Went through the typical 3 weeks of disasters — including erasing EVERYTHING. Calling the office from a motel in Bangor, Maine — and they overnighted me a cassette [!] with replacements. Then, I never looked back. Being a geek fits in fine with a lifetime of a passionate interest in science.
Anyway — sooner or later we will have a threaded forum and we needn’t be concerned about when a topic rolls off the page.
Paul Theodoropoulos :
well, to do some shameless self promotion, since Mr. Dvorak taught me everything i know in that regard, One of my company’s other endeavors is Forumgarden. That’s a real threaded forum on a reasonably large scale. The quality of discourse ranges from the banal to the genuinely insightful. i’d say my own ‘journal’ on the site was a pretty good draft at discussing my conception of spirituality. but we digress from energy. not that this blog is burning up the internet…
Thursday, 20 October 2005
Tombstone :
Paul,Have you calc’d out the costs of putting up a modest array of solar panels and about 5 to 8 deep cycle batteries? I was wondering if you could then sell back that stored energy during the peak times during the day when electricity producers get larger kWh rates.
Paul Theodoropoulos :
i’d love to do that - but even a small array is cost prohibitive at this time (did i really say that?? translation: "i can’t afford it"!)it would be cool to set up an array that could supply only about 400 watts - enough to power my PC and monitor. one of the things that comes up from time to time on the net is the crazy inefficiency that’s costing huge amounts of electricity these days - the pairing of a UPS and PC. I think Daniel Bernstein describes the silliness of AC to DC to AC to DC pretty well. Huge amount of transformative energy waste in that chain. Though to be fair, most UPSes these days simply shunt the AC directly to the PC when not under a power outage, and just trickle charge the batteries. still. nutso.
Thursday, 22 May 2008
Chris :
Paul,
Any updates? I’m just getting my gear together to solar power our garage / workshop. Preliminary tests show that a couple of deep cycle batteries paired with a modest solar panel array with a decent dc to ac invertor will provide gobs o’ energy.