This past summer, my energy provider – Pacific Gas & Electric – ran a promotional program, the"20/20 Summer Savings Program". The program began June 1, and ended September 30th. During those four months, if you were able to reduce your electrical energy consumption by 20% over last year’s totals, PG&E would rebate you 20% of your total electric charges for that period on your October bill. A very smart program. Summer is the highest usage time of the year here in California, due to home and industry air cooling during the hottest periods. By encouraging homeowners to reduce their usage, it helps level the daily peaks somewhat, and reduces demand on power generators (as should be known, power plant capacity has to be built to satisfy peak demand, even if that peak demand interval is only for a small portion of the year, and a small portion of each day during the peaks as well). I went after the rebate wholeheartedly. I had already purchased a "Kill-a-Watt" meter a year ago – a wonderful energy saving device that you plug into an outlet, then plug into that whatever you want to measure, and it gives you true kilowatt-hour usage readings. I got mine on ebay – just do a search on Kill-A-Watt and you’ll see plenty of listings. I didn’t reach the 20% goal unfortunately, but did manage to reduce overall consumption by 14%, not half bad when you think about it.

How did i reduce usage?

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1. I used to leave my computer on 24×7. The justification was that since I’m a systems administrator, I need fast access to get online if there’s ever a problem with my servers. Which is true. However, problems with my servers are so rare that the five minutes to wait for my PC to fire up in the middle of the night is of little consequence. I’ve not had an unplanned outage of my servers in a couple of years now. What few emergencies there are are not immediately customer-affecting. My PC alone burns about 155 watts continuously, or about 3.5kWh if left on continuously.
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2. I was running previously – and now that the rebate program is over have resumed – running the Folding@Home client on my computer. I won’t belabor the good that comes from running F@H, suffice to say that I’d encourage others to run it. If you’d like to contribute your work unit results to my team, you can visit My team page for details. However, running the client at maximum usage added a good 20W to 30W continuously to the computer’s power consumption, so for about half the duration of the program, I suspended running it.
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3. My monitor burns about 95W – 110W on average when cranked up to highest contrast. I ran a ‘gamma correction’ program to get the optimal settings, and brought that down to the range 85W to 100W. Not a huge savings, but it helps (it’s a big old 21" CRT). I also set the power savings to kick in a lot sooner – after three minutes idle – so that the monitor will blank more quickly if I step away for a bit. The blanked consumption is a mere 4 watts.
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4. I discovered, much to my dismay, that my ‘home theater’ system burns – when not being used at all - nearly 150 watts! 33 watts are the (gigantic) big screen TV idle current. 19 watts are from the (gigantic) power amp when left on but idle. The TiVO burns 29W continuously, and the Comcast HDTV DVR burns 44W. The remainder is I assume various ‘bits’ of idle current in the UPS, the main audio receiver, etc.. I was able to reduce the usage pretty significantly – put the bigscreen on a hard power switch, so at night when we’re done with the TV, off it goes, completely. We’re leaving the gigantic power amp off almost all the time now - it drives only the subwoofers, and for most TV content it’s just not needed. If we rent a DVD we turn it on. And through most of the summer, almost all the HDTV broadcasts were repeats – so I just left the comcast DVR unplugged. I now have it on a timer, so it comes on in the early evening and goes off in the wee hours of the morning. It needs to be on continuously for at least a few hours every day in order to get guide updates, and of course when watching hi-def content. But otherwise, there’s nothing overnight or during the day for it to record, so off it stays. The TiVO pretty much needs to be on all the time, since there’s a number of programs that are regularly recorded overnight.
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5. I maintain some backup servers in my garage - I have a dedicated high speed internet connection, so I’m able to provide ‘offsite’ backup services for my main business here. I used to have three servers. I was able to consolidate functionality from two of them into one, so that eliminated one whole server. and I also found that instead of the net 6 processors that were running those two servers (4 in one, 2 in the other), I’m able to get by just fine with only *one* cpu in the remaining machine! that saves a LOT of power. The remaining other server, I pulled some of the memory from it that wasn’t needed, and detached a second harddrive that was unused as well. All the equipment there was previously burning 235W continuously, that’s now down to about 130W I believe. That’s really the bulk of where we saved. And the beauty of it is that it’s not a hardship at all. even though we didn’t meet the rebate requirements, we saved about $90 over the four months compared to usage a year ago. Not too shabby.

I think the Kill-a-Watt is a great investment. Really seeing how much power a device is burning can be, uh, illuminating, to employ a bad pun. I recommend getting one if you’re interested in saving both energy and money.

Tags: Energy, saving energy

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