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Kill a Watt – Part II
Well, it's been a little longer than a couple of days, but as promised here is the second installment of my Kill-A-Watt story. Those of you just tuning in, I bought a Kill-A-Watt meter. Basically you plug it into an outlet, and plug your electric device into the Kill-A-Watt, and presto, it will tell you how many Amps and Watts that device uses. The Kill-A-Watt meter also has a timer built in, and a Kilowatt per hour energy reading on it.
My goal is to determine how much energy my Apple G5 Computer uses in various modes. Here are the preliminary results of my two computers:
Computer A - Apple G5 Dual 2.7 GHz / 2GB of RAM / 2 x 250GB drives / 20" Cinema Display / 15" Viewsonic display and an Epson V350 scanner.
Computer B - Dell 2.4 GHz basic computer with a 40GB or something drive in it. Not used much except for accounting and checkout out my Website designs in IE.
I plugged my main power bar into the Kill-A-Watt device. Into the power bar is everything listed above and an IO Gear KVM.
As a baseline, with everything turned off, except the scanner, which has no power switch, the Kill-A-Watt showed me 8 watts usage.
Nothing turned On - 8W
Apple starting up - 330W
Apple right after startup - 260W
Apple in sleep mode - 14W
Windows starting up - 400W
Windows right after startup - 60W
Mac Sleeping/Windows running - 73W
Mac running/Windows running - 400W
My plan now is to run all my computers as I would normally for a period of 1 week. Which means hardly ever putting the Mac to Sleep, and never putting the Windows machine to sleep. At the end of 1 week, I will then go into energy saving mode and turn off the windows machine when it is not being used and put the Apple to sleep when ever I walk away from it.
My usage on the Apple is pretty heavy, starting at 7:30am and usually finishing around 8:30pm, with some breaks through out the day and a little over an hour for supper with the family. The windows machine is used very rarely, and then only lightly.
To get the ball rolling, I have had the Kill-A-Watt measuring my usage for the past 48 hours and it tells me that I have used 14.8KWh, or $0.7725.
Check back next Monday to see how much energy I have used over the course of a week and a bit.
Why just your computers? You should do every appliance that plugs into the wall…you might be surprised at the waste generated by ghost loads when power is left on to vcr, dvd etc.
I did not see part one so maybe I should not comment, but check it all out, not just computers.
regards
George