Hippo, birdie, two ewes...

... to chriso and screaming_angel!!!! Have a great one!!

Done yesterday (20100917 Fr)

( raw notes )

A good day -- better than I expected, in fact. Work had an off-site team-building shindig at Malibu Grand Prix -- pizza and go-cart racing. More fun than I expected; also more physical -- those little carts have no power steering. Some decent conversations.

On the way home I stopped at Fry's in Palo Alto and picked up another batch of microfiber cleaning cloths, and an Intel D510M0 fanless atom mini-ITX board. The idea is to replace my fileserver with something that gobbles a lot less power. It would also free up my present fileserver to be my desktop; it has a faster CPU and more RAM than my current one. (I'd be tempted to get another D510MO, but I think that would be an unnecessary expense.)

My power bills are outrageous at the moment; I've also taken to shutting my desktop off at night.

Not a lot of links today, but you're welcome to 'em.

Power

Just some quick calculations. My power bill is outrageous. Thanks to California's ill-advised experiment with deregulation a few years back, and Enron's immediate exploitation thereof, my marginal rate is $.40/KWH. Eeep. I needed to have thought more about this quite a while ago.

My power consumed last month was 1086 KWH. There were 360KWH = $144 charged at the top rate; the bracket below that is $.29. Could I save as much as $144/month?

I have a bad habit of leaving lights and computers on, and even though every bulb in the house is a CFL now, and we use gas for cooking, heating, and the drier, it adds up. Fast.

There are 720 hours in a month. If I shave off 10W, that's nearly $3/month, or $35/year. That's, um... a hard drive. Or a light bulb. If I shave off 200W (full time, or the equivalent in part-time usage), that would save me my $144/month.

Nova, the fileserver, is currently consuming 21% of its 260W UPS, so that's 54W. Um... $175/year to keep my fileserver going. I don't know how much the new Atom-based board will save, but probably at least 50%. It'll pay for the $80 worth of new motherboard in the first year.

Dorsai, my desktop, is on an 708W UPS and eating 12% of it, so that's 93W. GAAK! (That includes the monitor, though.) Leaving it off while I'm at work and overnight is going to save a bundle. Swapping the CPU with Nova will help, too. Going from there to another atom board might not save me all that much.

Stargate, the router/gateway, is taking 5% of 865W (along with the cable router, the wireless access point, and the ethernet switch) -- that's 43W. But its CPU is already a fanless C7; the only way I'm going to save any power there is by using the WAP as my firewall. Somewhat less by taking the 500GB drive off and port-forwarding to Nova.

Colleen's floor lamp has 3 13-W CFLs in it, and tends to stay on 24/7 because the switch is hard to reach. That's 28KWH/month! I don't know what the standby usage of the two ancient CRT TVs is; the one downstairs is rated for 75W. I don't know their duty cycle, either.

There are probably at least 50W worth of lights in the garage and attic. They tend to stay on because it's inconvenient to reach the switches, especially when you're carrying stuff. Motion sensors?

Stay tuned. I can get 100KWH easily, at least.