Comments on my Telewest cable box entry below seem to bear out my rough calculations, so I thought I’d share this with anyone that doesn’t know how to calculate rough costs.
Category Archives: Energy
Telewest Heat Your Home
Since the Countrie Bumpkin and myself have had a few discussions lately about power usage (and the bastard has robbed me of a few watts by having his UPS back fully charged), I’ve added a category: Energy, and while I’n not going in for tree-hugging hippy crap, any of my further rants and observations about energy use will go there.
Observation for the day: if you thought switching your telewest cable box to standby was better than leaving it on, you are right, but not very right.
Continue reading Telewest Heat Your Home
Standby
Following on from my power thoughts, here’s a fairly in-depth discussion of the standby power problem (ie: the lack of hard on/off switches). Doesn’t change my opinion on the relative waste elsewhere, but it’s worth a read as a well-written article. It’s worth noting some modern TVs (mine included) manage the 1 watt standby power that’s mentioned.
Interstingly enough,it’s always said that power consumed on standby is wasted. This is of course, untrue if it’s winter and you heat you house. Most of this ‘wasted’ energy is dissipated as heat, so some of it (not much, I’ll grant you) will be offset against your heating costs.
[Update]
Looks like the BBC have been thinking along similar lines to me.
High Energy
[typed in Greece, on Zaurus- very low power consumption :-)]
As i have been disconnected from the tech world for a week- no GPRS or 802.11- and if there had been GPRS, cost and an unscheduled dip in the pool for my k700i put paid to that, i got thinking.
About energy use.
I’m probably an offender for excess there, but it’s bugging me how we are all being told to not use ‘standby’ on our tv, as it wastes enough energy to heat Birmingham for 3 millenia or so (poetic licence in use).
Continue reading High Energy
Power Down
I’ve been looking at reducing energy bills, given the ongoing price hikes, and the first step has been to look at replacing the old piece of shit boiler we have. That’s soon to be underway (£££!), and another thing that seems like a good idea is to reduce the PC power consumption, as I have 2 ‘servers’ and a firewall PC running pretty much all the time. I’ve thought about either an old laptop, if I can find one, or splashing out on a Mini-ITX PC for one server or the firewall. Trouble is, the firewall would need 4 ethernet ports, plus Mini-ITX=£££ compared to old, throwout PCs. Anyone know a very cheap source of Mini-ITX, or of multi-port ethernet cards?