Been idly looking at the graphs from our electricity monitor, Our baseline consumption seems to be about 250 Watts. Out of interest what is other peoples?
We have running AFAICR:
HP microserver and external disk - about 40W idling Fishtank pump network stuff, Switches, routers etc. 7 I think a desktop PC asleep
2 printers, a TV in standby a couple of cd/radios on standby- bugger all, one printer is about 2W, the others
Is that with or without active people?
Night time, everyone asleep is about 250 W. Day time, people active is about 1 kW.
That is quite high, my baseload is 100W with everything off or in standby and 50W higher if the main PC is on but idle (screen sleeping).
Unavoidable power use by cooker, microwave and freezer displays, alarm and emergency lighting. Most of the rest are
According to MiData my annual consumption is 1760kWh, so an average rate of 200W, when I glance at my smart meter display, it's rarely below 130W.
No doubt the F/F is my biggest background draw.
Don't tend to leave "server" PC running unattended these days, one or two laptops, one telly and one DAB radio either on or on standby, phone/tablet/ereader chargers eat bugger all unless actually charging.
No incandescent lighting, higher occupied rooms are LED, CFLs or linear fluorescent elsewhere.
Printers (colour laser and an inkjet) are rarely used, so off unless required, TV loft amp, router+switch, DECT basestation, more line-drying than tumble-dryer use last year for a change.
Overnight, when everyone is in bed and hopefully asleep. Daytime (2-4 people in the house) we have a similar useage of around 1kW.
We have a few things on smart sockets (sound system on the PC, DVD and Wii with the TV) The various networky bits consume getting on for about
30W I think. For various historical and practical reasons (bit of rambling victorian house with solid walls) we've got a Openreach FTTC modem, router, wireless AP, Samknows monitoring box and 8 port switch, which draw 22W with a couple of switches and a pair of powerline adpatersTV is pretty new Samsung plasma (July 2012). In standby it draws
I'm not sure how useful "snapshot" readings are, and prefer to look at the average over (say) a 24 hour period - to allow for freezers, etc. which are essentially on all the time but actually cycling on and off on their thermostats.
When my holiday flat is not occupied, it uses 1.5kWh per day pretty consistently - which represents an average load of 60-odd watts. Most of this will be the fridge/freezer (probably something like 250 watts on a
25% duty cycle) with the other stuff - time displays on oven and microwave, Teasemade clock (yes, I know), broadband router, etc. - taking next to damn all.
Total consumption here is a lot more :-) but this is just a general musing post really, I know where most of our leccy goes I think.
Probably ours is freezer, closely the tropical fish tank - primarily the
100W heater on a 30-50% cycle,I tried to workout how to have it turned off some of the time, but with people in the house most of the day and it running local and online backups, email, media server etc. and it being in the cellar it was not worth it/too much palaver.
Both ours are very low power when in standby and in different rooms, and not necessarily anywhere near where the person printing is, so being turned off was just a pain. - was ok when we just had a desktop pc and printer near each other.
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A snapshot of your minimum base load is worthwhile since it is there using power 24/7 and if you can shave 10% off it an immediate saving.
Most modern kit is frugal enough but some early digital TVs can be taking nearly 40W in standby if you have manufacturers defaults.
I found a couple of ancient wall warts lurking down the back of my office desk when I first started monitoring my power usage. They powered a long defunct external 56k modems and had been sat there for a few years doing nothing at all useful apart from wasting power.
Background heating?
Yup. My I know how much the fridge and freezer etc. use on average over a day so the snapshot points out what else is running.
250W is 6kWh/day and with the fish tank (about 1.2kwh/day), fridge and freezer (about another 1.2 kWh/day) and we are talking 8.5 ish kWh/day before anything else is turned on.In message , Chris French writes
Actually, I will try setting it to turn itself on and off between say 1 am and 7 am and see how that goes, the local backups are over usb 3 and the remote one now over a 18 mbit FTTC rather than the old ADSL so a lot quicker. 6 hours/day would save 25% of the leccy
Out of interest, what do you use to monitor your consumption?
I has one of those first generation wireless monitors a few years ago, which used a current clamp on the meter tails, but it only showed instant usage with no ability to record. Also the batteries didn't last long, and only measuring current meant that it had to assume voltage and power factor. Basically it wasn't good enough.
A dedicated NAS like a QNAP will use much less. I used to use an HP microserver, which used about 50w with a couple of disks in it. I changed to a 4-bay QNAP which uses about 10w when idle with the disks spun down.
In message , Caecilius writes
For whole house consumption monitoring I've got an clamp on type Owl monitor(free from the council a few years back). Something like this, but an earlier model I think
I have a usb doobrie from Ebay attached to the server, which records the data as well. The software with it was pretty clunky, I've got some 3rd party stuff which is a bit less so. When I have enough roundtuits I might roll my own
It seems reasonably accurate for such a device, compared to the consumption measured with my plug in monitor.
For measuring consumption of individual plug in devices I have a version of the Kill-a-watt meter, which seems to pretty good and can take into account power factors.
This one I think:
Though about it, but server runs various things that probably won't on the QNAP
More round tuits
ISTR the HP N36L uses about 15W idle, with 2 disks.
That looks like an updated version of what I used to use. Mine didn't have any recording capability though, and didn't last 14 months on a set of batteries like that one claims to.
I had considered counting the flashes from the meter, which are guaranteed to corelate with what you're being charged. I think it would be fairly simple to do with a phototransistor and arduino, but I've not got any further than the concept stage.
I wonder if these smart meters that I've heard about will be open enough to allow the user to query them over some sort of radio protocol (zigbee, zwave or something). That would be nice.
That's in true standby mode. How often does it wake itself up, and for how long, to check for updates? Do you update it OTA or through a broadband connection? If the latter, I assume you have to keep router and modem on too.
AFAIK never. I think there was one firmware update to the TV at one point, can't remember if it flagged it up as available, or I just did a check at some point. I think it was over the net, but might have been OTA. I certainly don't remember anything in the manual about ti waking up to do this.
The 'Smart TV' bit and apps sometimes has updates, that pops an alert up when you open the Smart TV interface or the individual app.This of course is over the net connection.
There would be no need for a permanent Internet connection, though ours is always on anyway
I've got a Current Cost
Current only but seems fairly accurate. At least it's not obviously out, 3kW immersion shows as a 3 kW increase ... The low end might be less accurate of course. Getting the clamp well positioned and stable around the tails is critical to getting good readings.
I have logs from the Current Cost going back to 14th Jan 2013 and meter readings back to 17th July 2000. One day I might compare the two.
I think I've replaced the batteries in the sender once. I've had it for a lot longer than Jan 13. It used to be connected via RS232 to a different server. More data might be on that old machine.
There is nothing in the manual of our Panasonic but it powers up aound 0300 every morning. It's only the electronics not the (power hungry) display panel. How do I know? Used to have a Pi powered from one of the USB ports as a media player, USB would come, so would the Pi, HDMI connection would then turn the telly fully on...
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