bill wrote:
I applaud the idea of energy efficiency and steps to monitor energy useage so no criticism is intended in saying that examination of energy consumption by idle pcs (I hope) will just be the first step in a multi-faceted effort.M. Fioretti wrote:
1) are there any exhaustive statistics on how many Watts a current
computer (say P4 with 7200 rpm drive + energy star monitor) really
dissipates when idle? Not peak figures, the actual electricity
adsorbed when it's on but doing nothing, just waiting for somebody
to hit the keyboard
A regular CRT monitor consumes more electricity than the PC its connected to. So, turning off the tube will save you quite a bit on electricity. Newer LCD panels consume much less than a CRT, and the ones I'm familiar with are in the neighborhood of 35W. I had a 20" CRT that heated the room it was in, consuming over 200W.
Bill's point about a CRT heating the room is double edged. In warm weather the heat generated by pc useage increases the amount of energy used to cool while in colder weather that same heat source reduces the amount of energy consumed by heating systems to maintain facility termperatures.
The point here is that the net energy savings from shutting down pcs when they are not is use is not a linear function of energy consumed by pc devices alone. The same is true of electric lights. To illustrate, with outdoor termperatures near zero (fahrenheit) I once lost heat in a home relying on a fuel oil heat system and an above ground oil storage tank. A small amount of water in a fuel oil delivery had found its way into the tank-furnace line and froze. Temperature in the house had dropped into the mid-to-upper thirties before I thought about heat from electric lighting. Turning on every light, TV and radio in the house raised the inside temperature to the mid-50s and maintained it there until the fuel oil service could restore our home heating.
