Cost of running a PC

B0bbyEwing

getmore4less said:

B0bbyEwing said:

getmore4less said:

That says it needs a 18 watt power supply, the actual draw will be a lot lower,  in use and standby 

Then by the same token, the same applies for my 8TB, in which case you are saying WD are incorrect in what they said to me.

I'm not saying you're wrong with that, I'm not saying they're wrong. I don't know, clearly, which is why I'm here.

Anyway I bit the bullet last night & bought one of these device tracker things to see what various items are actually using. 

I did see that £10 one but noted in the review section someone saying you can't reset the usage counter. So I track the PC, go ok then, now I want to track the kettle. Bit stupid if I can't reset it to see what the kettle uses for a 1 cup boil vs a 2 cup boil for example.

Sure you could just deduct the PC usage from it but the device is supposed to be the smart thing here, not me. 

I wanted one where I don't have to look at the screen as sometimes it will be in out of the way places or near the floor.
The tapo ones can view through the app anywhere which will be good enough to start.

I have seen home automation reports where they capture the data continuously through home_assistant ,will be trying that at some point
eg this on twitter   

https://twitter.com/robhawkes/status/1562110060733546497

I have a heating/water(OWL) that allows continuous capture of the data from the devices.    

That's an interesting one (your owl). Never heard of that before (nope, not taking the piddle, I'm talking about in that context).

Although last week or so we ran a test to price up what a shower costs & it came out as 9p just using the meters for pricing. That surprised me a lot how cheap it was. Would need to do a couple more tests I think as that one was my wife having a shower and it was a pretty quick one. We had been considering having sink washes IF pricing got bad enough but at 9p per shower we wont need to.


Regards the out of sight - I read about the one I bought, you can remove it & it has an internal battery where it'll display the cost still.

Granted, with an app you don't need to faff about plugging/unplugging.

getmore4less

B0bbyEwing said:

getmore4less said:

B0bbyEwing said:

getmore4less said:

That says it needs a 18 watt power supply, the actual draw will be a lot lower,  in use and standby 

Then by the same token, the same applies for my 8TB, in which case you are saying WD are incorrect in what they said to me.

I'm not saying you're wrong with that, I'm not saying they're wrong. I don't know, clearly, which is why I'm here.

Anyway I bit the bullet last night & bought one of these device tracker things to see what various items are actually using. 

I did see that £10 one but noted in the review section someone saying you can't reset the usage counter. So I track the PC, go ok then, now I want to track the kettle. Bit stupid if I can't reset it to see what the kettle uses for a 1 cup boil vs a 2 cup boil for example.

Sure you could just deduct the PC usage from it but the device is supposed to be the smart thing here, not me. 

I wanted one where I don't have to look at the screen as sometimes it will be in out of the way places or near the floor.
The tapo ones can view through the app anywhere which will be good enough to start.

I have seen home automation reports where they capture the data continuously through home_assistant ,will be trying that at some point
eg this on twitter   

https://twitter.com/robhawkes/status/1562110060733546497

I have a heating/water(OWL) that allows continuous capture of the data from the devices.    

That's an interesting one (your owl). Never heard of that before (nope, not taking the piddle, I'm talking about in that context).

Although last week or so we ran a test to price up what a shower costs & it came out as 9p just using the meters for pricing. That surprised me a lot how cheap it was. Would need to do a couple more tests I think as that one was my wife having a shower and it was a pretty quick one. We had been considering having sink washes IF pricing got bad enough but at 9p per shower we wont need to.


Regards the out of sight - I read about the one I bought, you can remove it & it has an internal battery where it'll display the cost still.

Granted, with an app you don't need to faff about plugging/unplugging.

https://www.theowl.com/index.php/owl-intuition/

They do energy monitoring, I have the heating controls for boiler and hot water

Chosen as the only one that allowed time &temp control of a water tank(not seen any others do that yet)

Was great until they went to service model and £10 annual fee for their server side support with dashboard control.

Through the API you can do the same locally with some work.

Gas use for house and water heating is a big energy use area that can generate significant savings with some fine tuning.

On the electric side it tends to be a few bigger wins(appliance change) with smaller ones over time where things tend to be left on for convenience.

I suspect our entertainment(Tv etc.) is using a fare chunk in standby also as I tend to hibernate my PC setup probably some reduction there, the big one is in progress a move to a low power micro PC away from the 12yo mini towers.

The trick to reduce shower cost is wet,  soap, rinse  turning the water off in the middle

B0bbyEwing

Well the electricity monitor has been plugged in with the WD My Cloud Home for a couple hours now.

Seemed to settle at about 8W but after coming back home from popping out I saw it giving 2W as the reading. To be fair, the original 8W was me having just unplugged it & re-plugged it.

So then I used the app on my phone to access the drive & it shot up to about 22W before dropping back down to 10W.

As for actual cost, I haven't looked as it's not been 24hrs yet.

getmore4less

My two tapo arrived yesterday.
First test plug them into each other.
Looks like they use 0.7w -1.0w  seen 1.4w when switching

B0bbyEwing

B0bbyEwing said:

Grey_Critic said:

Perhaps the way you asked the question -

Oh you mean when I said:

B0bbyEwing said:

I'm trying to look in to what things we have at home & how much they're costing. Can we change how we use them to save money. Some things will be certainly yes & other things no but I'm just looking at it at the moment.

I do apologise for coming across as worried. I thought I'd come across as just looking in to something, inquiring. 


Anyway, is 36W a lot for a hard drive? I'm wondering if I've got this right:

So I bought a WD My Cloud Home 8TB drive. I contacted WD out of curiosity (looking back, I should've told them not to worry - I'm not worried. They probably think I'm a nervous wreck now) to see what this cost to run.

Reason being - it's plugged in 24/7 (as is its design to be), but I don't often use it. 
My phone's photos auto back up to it.
If I have something on my phone I want on the PC then I send it to it there & then in a specific folder.
Certain things on the PC are backed up to it.

But all in all I don't really use it on a daily basis. I got it as it was 8TB of storage for an exceptional price, so while it's designed to be plugged in 24/7, I don't NEED it for that.

So my questioning was if it was costing a pittance then who cares. If it's going to add up then I'll pull the plug.

WD said the consumption was 36W.

I threw that in to: https://www.sust-it.net/energy-calculator.php

I used their default price cap as I only wanted a rough guide tbh

Said it costs £0.45 per day (or 44.93 pence).

Have I calculated that correctly? 


That's £14 a month. Over £150 a year just for it to be sat there being occasionally used.

If I've understood this properly & calculated right then that plug is getting pulled. I'm not worried but I'm also not throwing money away either.

Well something isn't right with the above.



So that's my WD drive plugged in. I set the price per kwh at the bottom there. 28.020 pence per hour. 

I hope I've not set that at £28 instead of 28p, but if that's £28 then my rate of 0.2802 as stated on the bill would have to be entered as 00.28 which would get close enough I suppose but would not be accurate.



Because that is the readout - £3.05 for a day. Actually, £3.05 for 24hrs54mins because I was out when the clock ticked 24hrs. 

The wattage ranges all over the place but it wasn't being used in that shot so was at 2.7W.

victor2

I'm not familiar with that monitor, but what you say doesn't add up.

£3.05 at 28.02p/kWh buys 10.88 kWh. To consume that in 25 hours, you'd have an average load of 435 watts. Clearly not possible with a WD drive. 2.7W on standby sounds reasonable though!

I'll leave it to someone else to advise on that particular device.

All you really need to know is how many kWh the drive consumes over a period of time where it is under normal use. It's easy to work out the hourly/daily average cost on your current tariff (or future tariffs) once you have that info.

B0bbyEwing

victor2 said:

I'm not familiar with that monitor, but what you say doesn't add up.

£3.05 at 28.02p/kWh buys 10.88 kWh. To consume that in 25 hours, you'd have an average load of 435 watts. Clearly not possible with a WD drive. 2.7W on standby sounds reasonable though!

I'll leave it to someone else to advise on that particular device.

All you really need to know is how many kWh the drive consumes over a period of time where it is under normal use. It's easy to work out the hourly/daily average cost on your current tariff (or future tariffs) once you have that info.

I'm wondering if the decimal is all to !!!!!!. 

I'm going to shift it so that it reads 00.28 instead of 28.02. Wont be 100% accurate because my rate is 28.020p as stated on the bill but if that's the issue then it'll be close enough.

getmore4less

UK currency unit is £ should say in the manual.


Got my newish low power pc set up with home assistant(took ages from scratch) and the tapo plugs feeding energy data.

Looks like default sample rate is 30secs.
(Job to see how easy to change)

PC sitting idle using about 6w-8w with the odd peak.
Going to add up when the rates go up.
Need to have enough things we can turn off completely to save.

Got a couple of smart lights might try to add those and set up a listener for the heating system outputs see if it changes usage much.
Think the 20+yo fridge and freezer might be scary.

mjm3346

"Think the 20+yo fridge and freezer might be scary."

A fridge-freezer over 20 years old may cost more than 6 times as much to run as a new A++ rating fridge-freezer.

getmore4less

mjm3346 said:

"Think the 20+yo fridge and freezer might be scary."

A fridge-freezer over 20 years old may cost more than 6 times as much to run as a new A++ rating fridge-freezer.

This energy audit is probably going to throw up a few options for replacement cost analysis as well as the turn it off.

Monitor(14yo Dell S2409w) I am using now is at 35W will get standby and off use later today.
specs are 

typical 31 W

standby 2 W

off 1 W
other one also 14yo is same.

if those turn out to be real world  then a candidate for a smart switch I have dual screen an looking to add a 3rd.