You can also save energy and money by:

- only taking cold showers
- using candles instead of electric light
- not using air conditioners
- only eating cold meals
- walking or using public transportation instead of driving your own car
- turning off standby on tv, stereo etc.

...

There are quite a lot of probabilities to save energy - personally, I think that energy should at first saved where it is spend in the most useless way. I don't put on the light, if it's not dark, I have energy-saving electric bulbs, I drive the car very seldom, turn off standby etc. What I save there (especially with the car) is much more than what I spend for keeping my (currently two) BOINC crunchers occupied (one 24/7, the other one about 12/7). The difference is, that most of these things are not really needed. BOINC IMHO serves a very usefull purpose, so this will one of the last things I'd consider to deactivate.

There is still a lot of energy saving room here.

Why take more than one shower per month? Whether you need one or not, take one when you hitch up the horses to go into town for supplies the next day.

Take a cold "navy shower". Get wet and then TURN OFF THE WATER. Lather up. Turn the water back on and rinse off. Then turn off the water.

Somebody had to pump all of that water you are using to the top of a nearby hill so it could run down into your house (or cave). The guy at the stables probably has showers available for all of the horse drivers, anyway. There's no need to pipe all of that water out to your house (or cave). You can even stand next to the horse when it is washed down. Feel free to borrow the currycomb.

Shivering for awhile will even save wear-and-tear on the towels. You'd just have to wash them.

You can use a tub and washboard to do that, and hang the towels outside to dry.

I think questioning energy use is a good thing to do as long as you question ALL of your energy use. I apologize for the flippant and sarcastic comments of some members. No one thinks you should walk to work so you can run boinc.

However I would also question the accuracy of your readings. My fastest machine is a dual core AMD 4200+ that is overclocked by about 10%. It runs boinc on both cores 24/7, has 2 gig of high performance D-RAM, 4 120mm fans and 4 7200rpm hard drives. It never draws more than 200 watts - in fact, I've never seen it top 180. I don't doubt that some machines, such as a quad core could top 300 watts, but I seriously doubt that either machine only draws 25 watts when operating system is running (as opposed to being in suspend or hibernate mode).

It's probably a good idea to check the meter on something that you already know the wattage on. Try one check on the low end - say a light bulb and try another check on the high end - like window a/c, big screen tv, dehumidifier, or even a vacuum cleaner. Each of these should have the voltage and amperage - and probably even the wattage - right on the housing somewhere (by the way, you probably know this but watts = voltage x amperage). A portable space heater is also a good guage - these usually draw at least 1300 watts and should top out at about 1500.

If you see that the meter is more than say 10 or 20% off the stated wattage, you should probably get another brand of wattage meter. Probably the best known is the "Kill-a-watt" meter.

Once you have an accurate reading of true difference between your computer running boinc and not, I think you'll see that it's not a huge difference. Also, there's not law that says you should run your computer 24/7. If you often leave your machine on at night so that it can finish some task, there are utilities that will shut it down for based on certain parameters that you set.

I use AMP WinOFF. It's a free utility and seems to work pretty well - although I have only recently started using it do a daily reboot on machines that I don't look at very often (see the help file for how to do this or email me).

We can all do more to save energy, but unfortunately, in most cases saving money means spending it first - on compact fluorescents, new appliances, etc.

Running boinc does cost money and energy, but the amount over and above what would normally be used shouldn't be any where near as broad as you indicated in your post. And the potential benefits from whatever that incremental usage is will probably be of great benefit to all mankind.

I see this as a much bigger concern than what our machines may use to compute WUs.
This way of aggregating expenses is definitely impeding energy or water saving efforts because
-- people don't know exactly (or sometimes even approximately) how much they use
-- people may say like you "it's not a problem for me, it's shared between all of us"
-- people who are ready to make some effort are really not rewarded for their effort
-- eventually what is lost abnormally "somewhere" outside the apartments or the common space is either completely unknown or very difficult to measure (particularly true for water leakage under the ground).

When it comes to heating the waste is even more obvious and too often impossible to avoid. When the installation is so bad (or so complex) that some flats have to be overheated for having the most difficult to heat "just livable" you can see open windows in all those overheated flats while it's freezing outside! A real waste but people living there have no other choice.