On Mon, Oct 10, 2016 at 07:52:49PM +0100, Patrick O'Callaghan wrote:
On Mon, 2016-10-10 at 11:42 -0500, Mike Chambers wrote:
On Fri, 2016-10-07 at 16:35 +0100, Patrick O'Callaghan wrote:
As I said, I'm happy enough with suspend for now. My aim was to reduce power consumption at night (this isn't a server that has to be on all the time).
I dont' think computers use that much power (least normal workstations anyway) to bring up or down your utility bill much, so couldn't you just leave it on as is and just shut off your monitor until your ready to use it again?
I used to do that up until about a year ago. Since then I think I have noticed a reduced utility bill, but of course that's not really evidence as there are other factors, including lower rates because of the drop in oil prices. This is an i7 system with an Nvidia card, an SSD, a 1TB SATA drive and 16TGB of RAM, so probably above average for home workstations in terms of power consumption. The monitor is a 23- inch HP LCD.
If there were an easy way to measure it I would :-)
I can put some numbers on the discussion. I checked my electric bills for the last 6 months and the rate is about 8500 Watt-Hours for $1. As there are 8766 hours in a year, that means for me, a continuous draw of 1 watt will cost about $1/yr.
My UPS has a front panel display that can show watts drawn. Besides the computer and monitor, the only thing plugged into the UPS is an ethernet switch and a cordless phone charger.
My system is a little larger than Patrick's; a 6 core i7, overclocked to 4.0GHz, 32GB RAM, 2 SSD's plus 2 2TB rotaters, nVidia card and 24 inch LCD monitor. Much larger than I need, but I only buy one every 8-10 yrs.
Here is the power draw from the UPS under 3 conditions:
Computer idling, cpu's at 1.1GHz 110 Watts Monitor on but blank
Computer idling, cpu's at 1.1GHz 150 Watts Monitor lit
All 6 cores plus 6 hyper-thread 280 Watts cores running at 99% usage at 4.0MHz One SSD active, no rotaters active Monitor lit
So for me, at my electric rate, keeping this computer on 24/7 costs me about $100/yr. YMMV!
Jon