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World Community Grid Forums
Category: Retired Forums
Forum: UD Windows Agent Support [Read Only]
Thread: re: Electricity Cost & Your Computer |
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Thread Status: Active Total posts in this thread: 3
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Former Member
Cruncher Joined: May 22, 2018 Post Count: 0 Status: Offline |
re: Electricity Cost & Your Computer
----------------------------------------> electric bills skyrocketing which didn't make sense to me, ...i decided to see for myself: Thanks for actually thinking about it. > DSA-600 amp clamp Some ammeters can't correctly read the very spiky waveform of many PC power supplies. The crest-factor of this model is not clearly specified. I go by feel. After decades working with heatsinks, I can give a fair estimation of actual Watts dissipated. > So WCG draws 14 watts per hour on My work PC. at less than $0.05 per KwH ... that is about $6 a year if I ran it 24/7. My P-4 3GHz runs cool when idle, hot when doing WCG. Also some heat in the Northbridge and the RAM. I estimate a total 20 Watts added power dissipated. This is not out of line with Graham's value on a very different CPU. (The AMDs do tend to do more calculation on less Watts than a mainstream P-4.) However I have never paid $0.05/KWH. Yes, the tariff may show such numbers, but distribution, billing, and other charges bring MY cost to $0.11-$0.13/KWH at the socket. (Some historically rural areas do have much lower rates.) The marginal cost of an extra 20 Watts does not increase some of these costs, but does impact the delivery costs. I'd prefer to figure at least $0.10/KWH. I get a number $17.52/Year or $1.50/month or 5 cents a day for 24/7 WCG work. This is less than "pocket change". We saw similar cost-panic in the SETI project. In the few cases where people really investigated, there was always some other reason the electric bill went up, unrelated to CPU use. [Edit 1 times, last edit by Former Member at Nov 8, 2005 8:09:11 PM] |
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Former Member
Cruncher Joined: May 22, 2018 Post Count: 0 Status: Offline |
Interesting ideas, and I'm agreeing with you that the numbers they put across may well be off from what is true...
having said that I think that people lose this sort of money accidentally on the street, down the back of the sofa, etc ...obvisouly not at one time, but you get the idea  |
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Former Member
Cruncher Joined: May 22, 2018 Post Count: 0 Status: Offline |
That also is based on the fact that you already run your computer 24/7 even when not doing WCG. If you take a machine that you do not already use and set it up to do WCG then it does not just add an extra 20 watts, it adds a full 120 watts so the cost is 6 times higher or $105 based on your example.
This does not take into account the additional cooling costs in the summer (my AC ran alot more and thus higher cooling costs on top of that) nor does it concider the reduction in heating costs over the winter. My electric took a big jump because I setup 3 machines that were not already running to run 24/7 on WCG. (3 * 105 = $315/year or $25.25/month) + increased cost for ac over the summer. |
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