On 29/08/13 13:09, Les Kitchen wrote:
{Replying to Daniel Jitnah <djitnah@greenwareit.com.au>:]
FWIW, I have no doubt in my mind that the heat from the 400W power supply in my PC is contributing to heating my house! The room where this PC is located is distinctly slightly warmer than the rest of the house and there is no other obvious reason for this to be so. In fact, this room should be cooler as is one of the rooms further away from the ducted heating unit, but it is not. Going in the other direction, towards lower power use:
In fact that's one of the reasons why I switched from a regular PC tower (at 140W) to a Fit-PC (2W idle, 8W at full tilt) for my home server.
Absolutely, I did same a long while ago, replacing my proxy server and email server with a laptop instead of PC. And I can genuine say I saved at least $50 on my electricity bill if not more (that was a good 4-5 yrs ago, and I dont remember the figure, but it was significant). Having said that, that laptop will suffer the same fate as soon as I get a chance. On this: if any one has a ducted heating system of some age, it pays itself back multiple times to install a $15 timer on the power supply to the heater. (New ones more likely have electronic timer control - that why I said older ones). You can buy one for outdoor use at a hardware shop. There are the ones that can be set to turn the power on and off every 15 minutes. You can set the timing to suit your needs. Depending on the time, I sometimes set it to come on only 15 mins in a 1 hr period on a typical evening. Its mostly off during the day. You can set it to give a real temperature boost in that 15 mins that last the rest of the hour. I can say that the first time I did this, my gas heating bill move from not a much below $400 to about $180, for the same period in the year, at the peak of winter!! No exaggeration!! When you think about it it makes sense. It gives me very fine control on the heating. However it seems that this does not work well with all heater model. At a friends place, his heater did not like the frequent on-off cycles. And the pilot lamp tended to go off every few days. Not sure why. Cheers, Daniel
I figured it would pay for itself in a couple of years of power bills savings. Those little Android dongles, like the RK808, sometimes styled "Google TV" are pretty cheap (around $50 these days) and would make that trade-off even more attractive -- though it depends on what your needs are. There are efforts going on to run say Debian natively on such devices (rather than in say a chroot). I use my Raspberry Pi often as a low-end desktop machine and it's mostly usable for simple things -- if a bit laggy at times. I wonder how much faster it would run off an external USB drive instead of the SD card. I suspect that swap is the main laggy factor.
-- Smiles, Les. _______________________________________________ luv-talk mailing list luv-talk@lists.luv.asn.au http://lists.luv.asn.au/listinfo/luv-talk