Cut your PC power bill

Cut your PC power bill

Did you know that if you used your PC for five hours a day, you have to pay almost Rs 90 extra in your monthly electricity bill? This might not bother till you realise that it is well over Rs 1,000 a year.

I arrived at this figure by studying the CESC website. I found that the charges are over Rs 5 per unit. This “unit” is called a kilowatt hour (kWh) and is a measure of how much electricity is consumed. A 100-watt (W) light bulb used for 10 hours consumes 1 kWh of power.

You too can find out how much power your appliances consume by going to http://www.cescltd.com/cescyou/powerconsumption/powercosumpnet.php.

Typically most desktop PCs consume around 300W, and that is why your power charges average to around to a little over Rs 5 per unit. Add to this the cost of running your printer, scanner, modem, router and any other accessories you have. Hence it very important to find out the power consumption of the new desktop you are going to buy. Ask your vendor to look at the technical specifications of the PC you want to buy, paying special attention to power consumption.

The table below will give you an idea of how much electricity some PCs consume.

The AMD platform clearly requires more power when idle and the power requirement difference is even larger when it is hard at work. At 210W vs 163.5W, there’s a 28 per cent difference between Intel and AMD. Remember that the results cover all other system components, including motherboards’ voltage regulators and graphic cards and every moveable part.

Clearly, the Mac consumes the least energy although it comes with a very high configuration.

Our PCs, especially the powerful Windows–based PC workstations and ordinary desktops, consume a lot of power even when they are idle (which means the monitor is on screensaver mode and a lot of background work, like indexing, is going on).

Power management

A little known fact is that a computer draws almost as much power when it is on standby with a screensaver on as it does when in use. By turning off your PC and peripherals when they’re idle, and by employing the little used power management applet, you can cut energy consumption dramatically — 75 per cent or more (if you use your computer six hours a day). And even if you keep your PC on as a server, you’ll save energy by turning off the monitor when you do not need it.

Offices — with over 100 computers — keen on cutting costs, should following the power management scheme and save thousands of rupees in electricity bills.

To get to your computer’s power-management settings in Windows XP, right-click the Desktop and choose Properties—Screensaver. Click the Power button near the Energy Star icon, and select the Power Schemes tab of the Power Options Properties dialog box. For desktop PCs, choose the Home/Office Desk power scheme.

Even if you mean to leave your desk for 5 minutes, I suggest you insert 15 minutes under ‘Turn off monitor’, and for ‘Turn off hard disks’ select 30 minutes. Let’s face it, you will never be back at your desk in 5 minutes!

The Standby and Hibernate options under the Power Schemes tab too are useful for cutting your system’s energy use.

Here are some of my recommendations to save power:

If you use a desktop, use an LCD monitor. They use lot less energy than CRTs.

Turn your computer off when you're done for the day.

Use a Mac. As I mentioned earlier, Macs use much less energy than most Dell or HP or even assembled computers.

Use a power strip, also known as spike buster, so you can easily turn off all your computer accessories at once.

More power savers:

More and more builders are shifting to LED (light emitting diode) lamps from regular bulbs and tubelights. Unlike incandescent bulbs or even fluorescent lamps, almost all of the energy used by LEDs is converted to light, rather than heat. LED fixtures still cost more than conventional ones, but the energy savings can help commercial projects pay for themselves in as little as two years.

Even televisions and monitors are shifting to LED displays primarily because of the low power consumption, yet are also giving you the bright lights and vibrant colours you require.