The electricity bill at home had grew quite a bit since I moved to San Francisco, that makes me wonder how much of this increase is from the new computers at home; A NAS, Linux web server, Thinkpad T60 laptop, and a MCE has being introduced.

In order to balance lifestyle and being nice to the environment, the first step is to identify any power usage point that is power hunger. With this information, I can decided how best to minimize the power consumption. The tool for the task is this:



The "Kill a Watt" meter measures power usage, that can be used to estimate month power usage of an appliance.

I used the meter and collect the following information:

MCE (AMD Athlon X2 3800+ 2.0Ghz)
- turn off/sleep: ~4W/hour ~2.8kW/month
- idle: ~49W/hour ~35.2kW/month
- heavy use (movie encoding): ~88W/hour ~63.4kW/month

Promise N4300N NAS
- in service: ~58W/hour ~41.5kW/month

web server (AMD Athlon X2 4800+ 2.5Ghz, Cool n' Quiet off)
- in service: ~107W/hour ~77.1kW/month

Thinkpad T60 (Intel Core2Due T5600 1.8GHz, power stepping on)
- in service idle: ~25-40W/hour ~18-29kW/month

Aopen MiniPC (Intel Celeron M 1.4)
- off ~2W/hour ~1.4kW/month
- idle ~24W/hour ~17kW/month

Currently, I keep the MCE suspended when not in use so it can be instant on when I want to watch movie, it sips ~3kW/month. My Thinkpad is 24/7, which consumes ~30kW/month. NAS and web server are also 24/7, that eats 42kW/month and 72kW/month. MiniPC is currently not in use, so no power consumption.

In total, the minimal total power consumption is 147kW/month. A quick check from PG&E, a 200W/hour (144kW/month) consumption costs ~$20/month. This translate to 1 pound/kWhour == ~106k pounds of CO2 generated..... quite a lot! ( info: http://tinyurl.com/8d2hae )

Even with a moderate power usage and coat, I can do better by turn on Cool n' Quiet on my web server since it's on 24/7 and use quite a bit of electricity. In addition, maybe considered suspends my T60 at night when the suspends bug on F10 is fixed.