On Thu, 29 Aug 2013, Daniel Jitnah wrote:
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.
And we come full circle. My raspberry pi controls a relay that is effectively in series with the gas central heating's thermostat and fan control (in place of your timer - which suited me well for a couple of years, but lacked the ability to ssh into it from work). Now I need to start working on the 15A air conditioner version before Summer. Damn, wait, it's already summer. Which reminds me, I really should ssh home and change the cronjob now that this season's patching cycle has come to an end and I no longer need to be at work at 0730.
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!!
I got rid of my girlfriend and adjusted the thermostat down by 5 degrees :) -- Tim Connors