British Gas eco-toys

My British Gas freebies arrived yesterday (big thanks to Peter Parry for the 'heads up' and offer code). It's the second thing Peter has helped me with, the first being the author of an excellent website that gave me the confidence to play with phone extensions years ago). Has anyone else received theirs? Anyway, I wouldn't have bought either of the products with my own cash. I don't have a use for the IR receiver power strip (turning my gear on and off at the wall is no hardship), but I tested that it works. It's going to be someone's Xmas present! The "Minim" electricity monitor has been a bit of fun. Came with 3 zinc-carbon C cells for the transmitter, imported from China. I think it gets confused by power factors and it samples every two seconds, so the washing machine motor turning the drum over a few times each way has the readings all over the place. Haven't bothered with the costings as it can't do split unit tariffs. Haven't bothered setting a "target consumption" either. The examples in the instructions seemed rather high, but maybe I have a simple house without lots of tat left on standby. I'll keep using it for a month, see how accurate it is compared with the meter, then the novelty might have worn off.

James

Reply to
Part timer
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I cannot say I saw the original post. When was it posted?

Gio

Reply to
Gio

100% "Friends of the Sod certified":

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might still be available. I had submitted my details and forgotten about it until the postman put a card through saying he had kindly left it on the doorstep (without knocking).

Reply to
Part timer

No & I'd forgotten about them TBH.

Reply to
The Medway Handyman

Mine arrived 2 days ago - and I'd forgotten about it as well!

The standby thing seems to be more trouble than it's worth. The TV is 0.9W (MaplinMeter ??) so OK for the odd half hour.

As for the power monitor: at first my PC was shown as flicking between 80 -

90W, which is about the same as on the above MM. Turning off the monitor dropped it to 40 - 50W, which is about right for a 35W monitor. Next time I turned on the PC it was 190W! The monitor dropped it by ~100W - not bad via a 12V 3.3A PSU. If the PC were to run at 90W+ the CPU would fry as it's 65W TDP and is very rarely at >50%.

The 3kW kettle showed as 2.94kW, same as on MM.

I need to get rid of everything with 'strange' PSUs and PFs that aren't unity then the Minim will be OK.

Reply to
PeterC

The key bit seems to be to state that youy're on benefits or over 70

Reply to
pete

Did you let it settle or was that the first reading after the switch on. OK SMPSU's shouldn't have much of an inrush compared to a motor or transformer based PSU but there will be a bit.

The CPU load does affect the power it takes but I'm not convinced it's a great deal and there will be other stuff taking power like the north and south bridges, graphics, and memory. Still it does look a bit odd.

I have a CurrentCost CC128 with the serial data hooked up to the server for logging. It's fun ploting out the days usage, I always turned the coffee machine off once the jug was half empty to stop the coffee stewing but having seen the plot will be better at that. As for the kettles "keep warm" feature...

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Reply to
Dave Liquorice

I let the PC boot fully and settle down, so about 2 min. I do wonder why it was 'right' the first time and then 'wrong'.

It's a quiet, low-power job. The PSU is a Seasonic 330W with aPFC; the fan never speeds up and the outflows from PSU and case are cool, so no way is it taking ~100W. The heatsinks on the mobo are warm, not hot.

I went next door to feed the new puppy. I needed hot water, went to turn on the kettle and it was at about 40 - 50C and no-one had been in the house for 3 hours. My neighbour hadn't realised what was happening - the kettle is now turned off at the wall.

Reply to
PeterC

Actually, they are often enormous spikes, but far too short to be visible on a power monitor or to care about the cost.

On modern PC systems, CPU can be quite a significant consumer of power. Also, OS's often don't load or start power management software particularly early on, so you may well have CPU cores falling back to a default idle loop spin initially. Later in startup when an OS checks for CPU-specific modules to load, and selects more appropriate modules optimised for that particular CPU rather than generic defaults, then you may get power reduction if the OS decides it can HLT in the idle loop, and even more so on modern processors where the scheduler may shut down cores when it doesn't have enough runnable threads to keep them all busy. (This is important for the likes of Nehalem where closing down cores you can't currently make good use of gives extra thermal headroom to the remaining core(s) and increases the chances of them being able to run in turbo mode, where they are deliberated overclocked.)

Also, many BIOS's don't seem to do anything to save power when the system is sitting in the BIOS itself, and this can result in peak power draw when you're in the BIOS before the system loads, and it's just spinning CPUs in its idle loop.

I happen to have a true power meter on an old PIII at the moment. When switched on, it's about 60W, and stays there whilst you roam through the BIOS screens, and when you boot the OS (Solaris x86 in this case). As Solaris boots, at a certain point when it cuts across to Solaris's scheduler, the power consumption drops to 20W when idle.

Reply to
Andrew Gabriel

I bought one of these a few weeks ago. Fortunately, I didn't buy it to save power, or I would have taken it back. It consumes 1.4W. Most mew devices on standby are now below

0.5W, so you would do better to leave them on standy than by using this device. (In my case, it's to automatically switch on a table lamp when we turn the telly on.)
Reply to
Andrew Gabriel

Something else came on at the same time... I find that the orientation and position of the current transformer on my CC is quite sensitive. Having it a bit skew can produce "odd" readings.

Ours has it as a seperate, lit, button to the main boil switch. We only use the boil switch for tea or heating water for cooking pasta rather than use the hob for the water heating. The keep warm switch off temp is fine for a mug of coffee and operates a good 30s before the boil cut off.

It was the coffee machine that really surprised me. What I can't obviously see are the fridges and freezers their plates are all

coming on.

As for my PC, that's 150W to 200W (it's an old 1GHz Athlon and the exhaust air is decidedly warm...).

Reply to
Dave Liquorice

100% "Friends of the Sod certified":

formatting link
might still be available. I had submitted my details and forgotten about it until the postman put a card through saying he had kindly left it on the doorstep (without knocking).

Thank you Part Timer,

Gio

Reply to
Gio

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