The Cost of Idle Readiness
(February, 2009)
If
you’re like me, you did a double take when you got your City of New Bern
Utilities bill this month. The electricity portion of the bill was up a
shocking
67%, and that was comparing to a prior month that included all the Christmas
lights. According to info on the bill, the average temperature for the month
was 44 degrees, down only four degrees from the month before. This much I
know: the friends and relatives I left behind in Cleveland, OH would kill for
those average temps this time of year.
This rekindled in my mind a question I frequently get asked: is it better to leave your computer on all the time, or shut it down when not in use. This would be a no-brainer if computers came on and up to speed with the rapidity of nearly every other device in the home. Can you imagine opening the refrigerator and waiting five minutes for the interior light bulb to stabilize? We live in a society where most of us stand by our microwave ovens snapping our fingers and saying “Come on, come on, come on already!” For that reason alone, the three primary computers in my house stay lit most of the time, though I regularly power down my monitor when leaving the room. I do usually shut my main machine down when I head off to work for the day.
The competing theories have always been that on one side you have the obvious issue of power consumption, both its cost and now also its contribution to our so-called carbon footprint. (By the way, if you get a carbon footprint on your rug, the Dollar store sells a product called ‘Awesome’ that does a great job of removing it.) On the other hand is the argument that start-ups and shut-downs contribute to thermal expansion and contraction of components which, over the years, degrades the components and can lead to failure.
I read an article that PC World Magazine had posted on its website a couple
months ago, and which appears now in print in the February Issue. The article
dealt with the ‘Vampire Power Waste’ caused by the plethora of electronic
devices in our home. Consider that for every remote control in your home there
is a device running at low but constant power, waiting just to receive the
signal from the remote to say it’s show time. The article mentioned a device
called a “Kill-A-Watt” (clever name, that), which one could purchase to measure
the power being consumed by individual devices in the home. The device is made
by P3 International and is sold by a wide variety of vendors on the internet. I
picked one up from NewEgg.com where it set me back a bit less than $25
delivered. You can check the device out
www.p3international.com; just look for their model P4400. Actually, they
have since come out with a newer model, the Kill-A-Watt EZ, which does the math
for you in figuring out the annual cost of running an electronic device.
To measure the electrical consumption of any device, you just unplug it from the wall, plug it into the Kill-A-Watt unit, and plug that into the wall plug, You get a read out on amps and watts. If you let it sit for a length of time, it will tell you the KWH (kilowatt hours) consumed over the interim.
I looked at my egregious January utility bill and computed a cost per KWH of $.1365. That is well above the NC average of $.1043 as of Oct. 2008 per the Energy Information Administration (http://www.eia.doe.gov/cneaf/electricity/epm/table5_6_a.html) – another cost of living in our fair city. Using that info and the readings of my Kill-A-Watt device, I could compute the cost of various devices both when running and when turned off. Yes, even when turned off, most of our electronic devices are consuming power, and computers are no exception. I figured that my desktop computer, monitor, and speakers, though turned off, were still costing me around $10 per year. When left on to idle, the cost came to around $168. So there’s an approximate cost of keeping that machine ready and able, about $.46 per day. To be honest, given my level of patience, that’s a bargain. Our Dell laptop, which is almost never off, would cost only about $2.40 per year in off-mode. Left on full time, the cost comes to around $40 per year. I have not yet gotten around to measuring the consumption of the router, cable modem, and printers.
The author of the PC World article, JR Raphael, found his most expensive power vampire to be a plasma TV which was costing him $165 just in standby power. Yikes! That caused me to check out my two LCD TVs which appear to only be consuming only one watt per hour in standby mode, and in full operation would cost about the same as Mr. Raphael’s plasma TV in standby mode. He did not say whether his was the size of one of our bright Highway 70 billboards.
The Kill-A-Watt meter sits in a drawer here most of the time. If any of my Taberna neighbors wants to borrow it to settle an argument with a spouse, give me a call or drop me an email. Meanwhile, I’m off to figure out where the rest of January’s electric bill came from. I half suspect the deer that have already eaten all our plants have found a space heater and are tapping into an outdoor outlet at night.