Monday, February 27, 2012

Watch your electricity consumption

This is a power meter I recently bought from Aldi. You just need to plug it into the household socket, and then plug your appliance into it. The display will show the wattage used.

I used this to check the power consumption of several appliances in my house. The result is quite interesting. I'll show you how much power my computers consume, as well as the cost per month at 22c per kWh, which is what I am paying to AGL now.

Our gaming computer (moderately hi-end): On standby, it consumes 90W (=$14.25 pm). With monitor on, it consumes 170W. When playing an intensive game, it is 355W. Assuming it is used for gaming for 4 hours per day, the extra wattage is 355W-90W=265W (= $7.00 pm, using 4hrs/day). In total, the running cost is $21.25pm.

My own computer (rather low end, dual core CPU, 2.66GHz): On standby it consumes 134W (=$21.22pm), even more than the gaming computer! This doesn't include the monitor, which is typically switched off when not in use.

The above may not look much, but together they represent 28% of my electricity bill. This beats spending thousands on solar panels. The 28% is slightly less than what my 15KW solar panel generates and it costs me AUD$3k, after government rebate of AUD$6k.

2 comments:

Vincent Chin said...

Are you sure your measuring device is accurate? I was tempted to buy it when I saw it at Aldi.

YM said...

I believe it is pretty accurate. I already knew that a computer typically draws about 80-100W in idle mode. I would be very surprised if it is even off by 1 or 2%.