Anyone playing with their Kill - A - Watt meter

[Terry]

How about doing a test on how much your computer is drawing.

I am guessing the hottest setup uses less than 200Watts most of the time.

[hallerb]

in the winter the waste heat helps warm your home..........

[Jim Redelfs]

Agreed.

I was amused to read the MagicJack thread where a couple of posters lamented that it required leaving on the computer 24/7 - in this day and age of rising utility costs! Horrors!

I haven't regularly shut down my computers for >15 years.

In my previous, electrically heated home, there were six, 100-watt incandescent lamps illuminating the play room in the unfinished basement directly beneath the living room upstairs.

I never chased after the kids, nagging them to turn off these lights EXCEPT when it was COOLING season. The light bulbs made GREAT heaters (with some incidental, "waste" light) that kept the living room floor nice and warm.

People that believe a running, but unused computer is particularly wasteful can't see the forest for the trees. More than the equivalent power consumption can be offset by removing one load of clothes from the dryer AS SOON as they are dry rather than letting the machine's timer run to the end. Hanging-out ONE load of laundry on a clothes line, rather than use a dryer, will save more energy than is used by the idle running of a computer in its lifetime.

[hallerb]

On Feb 8, 6:22=EF=BF=BDpm, Jim Redelfs wrote= :

d. =EF=BF=BD

another one is spending megabucks on a tankless water heater to prevent standby losses, while all during the heating season the standby losses help heat the home.

or spending thousands on a front load washer dryer pair......

the added cost of the unit, will never save money during the average life of the machines. worse the machines are less reliable and cost much more to repair

[CJT]

Not likely. A computer running 24/7 will use $100-$200 per year of electricity. If one load of wash cost that much to dry, we'd have heard about it.

[CJT]

But who has only one any more?

[Jim Yanik]

Jim Redelfs wrote in news: [e-mail]:

I shut mine down nightly;electrolytic caps in the power supply and motherboard eventually degrade,their ESRs rise and put more strain on the PS until something fails. also,the bearings in the cooling fans wear out. This PC I'm using had the microprocessor fan load the PS to where it would not start. A surplus fan from Skycraft cured that for $8.

[Jim Yanik]

" [e-mail]" wrote in news: [e-mail]:

That depends on where the water heater is located;if it's out in your garage,it's NOT heating your house. ("megabucks"???)

and during the summer,if indoors,the tank-WH puts a higher load on the air conditioning.

[hallerb]

[e-mail]:

frequent shutdowns lead to hard drive failures..........

[Jim Yanik]

" [e-mail]" wrote in news: [e-mail]:

Have you HAD the same PC for 15 years?? No.

define "frequent".

Hard drives wear out bearings,too. and if your PC is "ON",any power loss harms the data on the HDs,damages the disc surfaces when the head crashes on them.

[gfretwell]

IBM did a study on this many years ago when the 3.5" drives were becoming the standard. They decided a power down/up cycle was worth about 8 hours of running time based on available failure data.

Most hard drives fail because of electronics on the card or in the enclosure. In fact when we had a lot of AS/400s that lost all the data in the whole drive array when one drive failed, they made the drive electronics card available as a service part and most drives came back to life when we replaced it.

Heads don't really "crash" in PC drives, they land on the data surface when you lose power and all drives since the late 80s autopark in the landing zone as soon as you lose 5v, long before the drive actually stops spinning. Way back in the olden days drives loaded and unloaded the heads so they were not touchuing the disk when it stopped. They also had hydraulic head actuators in those days and the drives were the size of a washing machine.

[George]

Actually some might think that people who suggest leaving things on is OK for whatever reason can't see the forest for the trees. What if someone removed the clothes and turned off the computer?

Instead of just making up assertions like that think about what you wrote. Can I suggest that either this hypothetical dryer would be using monumental amounts of energy or the computer consumes the power of a single LED for your assertion to be accurate. Gather some empirical data and try to verify your assertion. Data I have collected shows that a minimally used typical computer uses the same amount of energy in 15 hours as used by an electric dryer used to dry a typical load.

[George]

For sure, numbers don't lie. One can rationalize whatever they like but real data shows something a lot different.

[gfretwell]

I was working on a dryer yesterday (GE) and I had my clamp on ammeter on the leads watching the load. The motor side pulls a tad over 25a and the heat only side pulls 22 and change (when the heater is on). When the heat cycles off you only have the 3 and change on the motor side. The heat is not on for the whole drying cycle. In fact, when it is in "automatic dry" the timer only runs when the heat is off. The thermostat is in the exhaust air stack and when the clothes are wet the air is too cool to make the stat. My PC, flat monitor ethernet switch, KVM switch, external modem, speakers, DSL modem, RF transmitter, ink jet printer and scanner pull between 1.5 and 1.85a depending on what I am doing.

[Nexus7]

Nonsense. A front-loader wrings out the water from the clothes much more, leading to less drying time. In the winter, a clothes dryer takes warm air from inside the house and dumps it outside. The less time it runs, the better. So a front-loader saves you money there.

More importantly, a top-loader is a primitive form of "washing" clothes, involving flapping an agitator in soapy water, and in the end wearing clothes with half the wash detergent in them still. A front- loader actually washes clothes. This is why the $4 machine at the laundromat is a front-loader.

Nonsense. The early US-made front-loaders had problems, they were beta- testing at the time. The Asian- and Europe-made ones did not, and the current US ones are fine too.

[Twayne]

Funny; I haven't yet noticed anyone discovering that by default or by power settings, most machines shut down the monitor, disk drives, etc.; everyone assumes everything is actually running 24/7. Anyone with a decent UPS can easily see what they're using for running power; the specs usually give the rest.

Lots of "assumers" and "me too" ers here today. Guessers, in other words, trying to sound like know it alls.

IT's just too obvious a thing to be able to figure out for most any thinking person.

[hallerb]

you can buy a decent laundry pair washer and dryer for 500 bucks.

a front load pair probably 3 times that. so to ever save any money the first thing you must do is save a grand on energy water etc.

that takes awhile and a friend who fixes appliances for a living and owns the business says by the time you get near payback something will fail on the machine.

maytags use a drum with intergrated bearing, cant just replace the bearing need a whole drum assembly, over 300 bucks.

of course it kinda depends on utility costs in your area.

and dont forget the extra grand cost could of been invested elsewhere

[ransley]

te:

end. =EF=BF=BD

Gas tank water heaters loose most of their heat up the chimney.

[George]

Exactly, someone trying to rationalize something can really come to a bogus conclusion without considering actual data. Excluding space conditioning most household electrical energy consumption (and waste) comes from the small things not the high wattage devices such as a dryer or toaster. As they say slow and steady wins the race and it is very true for the energy consumption race.

[Terry]

It is pretty clear you want us to think you have all the answers, but you didn't share any with the group.

Thanks

for nothing.