Cost of running a PC

B0bbyEwing

getmore4less said:

UK currency unit is £ should say in the manual.

Hahahaha. Manual s/he says.

Postage stamp with a bit of scribble on it you mean. Maybe that's what you get for £20 vs if I'd been willing to spend more. I thought £20 was plenty though & was disappointed with the pathetic 'manual' that came. 

I switched the decimal for another test. Boiled the kettle & it said £0.02. Not sure how accurate that is.

I thought I'd use the kwh reading to work out the cost but not sure what I'm doing tbh. I Google for energy calculators and it's wanting W or KW but my device doesn't state those, only how much kwh has been used and the supposed cost.

It does state W, but this bounces around all over the place when an item is plugged in that it's pointless trying to give a number as nothing is consistent.

k_man

B0bbyEwing said:

It does state W, but this bounces around all over the place when an item is plugged in that it's pointless trying to give a number as nothing is consistent.

This is a good illustration of why it is difficult to calculate usage, based on quoted figures on usage labels.

I thought I'd use the kwh reading to work out the cost but not sure what I'm doing tbh. I Google for energy calculators and it's wanting W or KW but my device doesn't state those, only how much kwh has been used and the supposed cost.

This shouldn't need an online calculator.
Takes the kWh recorded and * this by the unit rate.
That is the cost for the period of measurement.

B0bbyEwing

k_man said:

This shouldn't need an online calculator.

Takes the kWh recorded and * this by the unit rate.
That is the cost for the period of measurement.

Hey frugalmcdugal - the quote above shows how you can be a helpful member of the community. 


@k_man - thanks for the reply. That tells me then that I entered the unit price as £28.02 rather than 28.02p as doing what you just said got sort of the same result as the device, just with the decimal in a different spot and a result which made more sense.

Device said the hard drive cost me £4.11 which sounded ridiculous (for 1 day).
Your way says it cost me £0.0411 which sounds better & is in line with what an online calculator said it should cost approx (forget what it was, I think I mentioned it earlier in the thread - about 50p a day roughly).

So unit price will need to be entered as 00.28 and scratch the ".02" off it.
OR, just use the kwh & manually multiply by the unit price.

droopsnoot

B0bbyEwing said:

Device said the hard drive cost me £4.11 which sounded ridiculous (for 1 day).
Your way says it cost me £0.0411 which sounds better & is in line with what an online calculator said it should cost approx (forget what it was, I think I mentioned it earlier in the thread - about 50p a day roughly).

The way I would look at it is if you entered "28.02" to mean 28 pence, then when the device reads "4.11" that also means 4 pence. It will be reporting in the same units you entered, hopefully.

B0bbyEwing

Grey_Critic said:

More important question is what you are going to do when you find out.

Sit there & say:

ah, that's not as bad as I thought. I'll carry on as I am then.



That's almost 11 hours run time.

Granted it wasn't in full use for all that time but it would be probably typical Sunday use. Mixture of use & sleep mode throughout the day.

In to that was the PC itself, the monitor, the speakers w/ sub, the network switch & the landline 2nd phone base (if that even uses anything without a phone connected?).

Most W i saw at one point was approx 150W in use. Slightly over, slightly under but around that.

20 pence for 11 hours. Not too bad.


Dehumidifier & tumble dryer on the to do list.

SnakePlissken

B0bbyEwing said:

Rather than wait until 1st Oct & then go oh my how dear the bill has become, 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.

So on to the PC.

How do you calculate that?

I don't really know anything about electronics. I know when people talk about cost they talk about W so on that note the PSU in my PC is a BeQuiet BQTL7-530W.

I've started putting the PC in to sleep status when I know I'm going to be away from it for say 10mins+ whereas before I'd just leave it running. 

I wonder how much electricity it uses. In my small mind, if I compare it to a car, if you just coast at a constant steady speed you'll use less juice than if you nail it at top speed. 
So that makes me wonder with a PC, if I just power it up and watch a bit of YouTube and come on here vs say ripping a DVD/blu ray maybe (I wont say vs playing games because I don't play games on the PC, nor do I do any strenuous video editing). 

Our gas use has gone down considerably this year vs last year but our electricity is up quite a bit. Now there's a change in circumstances that meant I expected it to be higher, just not this much higher.

I have an i7 9700k, 750 watt antec earthwatts  and an 8gb ati rx580 graphics card and a 26 inch monitor.
My pc uses uses roughly 96 watt idling.

B0bbyEwing

SnakePlissken said:

B0bbyEwing said:

Rather than wait until 1st Oct & then go oh my how dear the bill has become, 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.

So on to the PC.

How do you calculate that?

I don't really know anything about electronics. I know when people talk about cost they talk about W so on that note the PSU in my PC is a BeQuiet BQTL7-530W.

I've started putting the PC in to sleep status when I know I'm going to be away from it for say 10mins+ whereas before I'd just leave it running. 

I wonder how much electricity it uses. In my small mind, if I compare it to a car, if you just coast at a constant steady speed you'll use less juice than if you nail it at top speed. 
So that makes me wonder with a PC, if I just power it up and watch a bit of YouTube and come on here vs say ripping a DVD/blu ray maybe (I wont say vs playing games because I don't play games on the PC, nor do I do any strenuous video editing). 

Our gas use has gone down considerably this year vs last year but our electricity is up quite a bit. Now there's a change in circumstances that meant I expected it to be higher, just not this much higher.

I have an i7 9700k, 750 watt antec earthwatts  and an 8gb ati rx580 graphics card and a 26 inch monitor.
My pc uses uses roughly 96 watt idling.

I've just looked at mine. Right now the devices I mentioned are in place. I have firefox, chrome, explorer, bitwarden & Groove music player open (if all that even makes a difference), I'm not really doing anything beyond playing the music as I check the usage

115W.

Mine is a fairly old PC though. Newer ones may be more efficient I don't know.

Anyway I'm happy enough with it.

getmore4less

Got my two tapo monitors connected to home assistant collecting data constantly

Moving them around, plugging different items in and making notes what stuff is doing at what time.

Can do the use analysis any time as the data is recorded.

Smart switch with monitor has a life after the monitor days are over.

What stuff uses when in use is not that relevant for things you need to use unless there are alternatives


It's finding the excess energy use in standby and off when it could be zero is where the low hanging fruit saving are.

High energy use items is where the big savings might be.


 

debitcardmayhem

Smart home stuff , Alexa,Nest,WiFi enabled bulbs, remote control switch what ever, ….. really smart switch equals 

B0bbyEwing

getmore4less said:

Got my two tapo monitors connected to home assistant collecting data constantly

Moving them around, plugging different items in and making notes what stuff is doing at what time.

Can do the use analysis any time as the data is recorded.

Smart switch with monitor has a life after the monitor days are over.

What stuff uses when in use is not that relevant for things you need to use unless there are alternatives


It's finding the excess energy use in standby and off when it could be zero is where the low hanging fruit saving are.

High energy use items is where the big savings might be.


 

Agreed. 

However some of what I was looking at was purely for curiosity reasons, which I'm perfectly entitled to do.

Like the hard drive for example - I don't use it a great deal so I tested to see if it used enough for me to bother turning it off. No point in turning it off without knowing.

The PC is another - weekends I'll spend quite some hours and only recently have I bothered to use the sleep function on it. For long enough I'd just go on it, leave it running, go outside, do whatever, come back, hop on, go off to do something else, leave it running. Now I can see what just putting it in to sleep does.

Likewise the kettle. You hear in the media - only boil what you need to. Well if I boil 2 cup instead of 1, is it going to really make a difference to get excited over? Now I can see. 

Once you see what things use, you can then make the decision as to whether you want to do anything about it as it's a bit pointless otherwise & there's nothing at all wrong with someone just seeing what individual devices cost them.