Power usage

Mine not only serves as a computer, but a noise blackage system and a heater, so my dad's cool w/ mine

"If everything seems under control, you're just not going fast enough."
- Mario Andretti

Most of them, are around 250W for power systems, and can go up to 350W if you use extreme clock speeds with very high end graphic cards.
No IMO they do not consume this much. If I am not mistaken, kilowatthour works in W*1h, so each 3-4 hours, you should be spending some cents.

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A Watt is a measurement of "power". It's a specific amount of energy (thermal, electrical, or mechanical), over the course of a specific amount of time. A Joule is a unit of energy.

Joule per second; British Thermal Unit (BTU) per second. Both are units of work, and you can convert between them.


Around here, a kilowatt hour runs about $.08 (after final taxes and those bonus "surcharges" ). A kilowatt hour is kind of redundant; there's two units of time in that derived unit. kiloJoule per second per hour; but it makes calculations a bit easier.


Say your toaster pulls 10 amps of current. 10 amps times 110 volts (Ohm's Law) is 1100 Watts; <i>or</i> 1.1 kiloWatts. Multiply that 1.100 kiloWatts by {.08 dollars per kiloWatt-hour}.

1.100kW * $.08/kW-hr ==> $.088/hr

Eighty eight cents per hour.

So, if you run that toaster for one hour, non-stop, that will cost you eighty eight cents. You just heated your house with a 1100 Watt heater, for the cost of $0.88.


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On your computer, the math process is the same, just with different numbers.

If you average it out over maybe a week, your computer will pull around 250w. Your hard disk isn't being accessed constantly (for most people), not all of your ram is being used, your burner and cdrom drive aren't spinning constantly, your speakers aren't blaring.

If you use it for 12 hours a day (fragging punk @$$ llamas on the internet!!), you can bump that up to 300w.

Your montior can pull (depending on the size) upwards of 100w. 350w.

So, every 3 hours, you'll pay $.08 (actually, a little over this, but I'm rounding down to 333.33w on the computer). Sixty four cents a day.



At, or just above, $20 a month. Figure $25 a month, with heavy gaming usage.



If you shut it off at night, you can half that cost; maybe $13. If you screen-save your monitor to "standby" after 10 minutes of non-usage or so, you can probably subract a 25% off that $25.




This whole kilowatt-hour thing, by the way, is called "Unit Analysis", or "Unit Conversion", or even "Quantitative Analysis". The cornerstone of Applied Science. You'll be doing a <i>LOT</i> of this when you start taking advanced science courses.

"I personally think filesystems should be rewritten from scratch every 5 years..." --- Hans Reiser

IIRC Watt is the power per second, while Joules is W/sec.
You said Watt is over a course of time, that is Joules, or Joules=Watts in a certain amount of time.

Also you obtain 0.088$ to pay, you said 88¢, just correcting you as it can be confusing to someone to say that! Boy 88¢ would be expensive!

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Posting from the garden of Eden...

The average joe is really only paying $4/month on their PC. We're not average though and if you keep it on 24 hours a day it'll add up as several have shown.

Nonetheless, if you turn it off at night and when you "really" aren't using it, your dad can rest assured that he's not gonna go broke.

I have the PC on quite a bit and electricity here is expensive, yet my ENTIRE electricity bill is just a bit over $20 a month for a one bedroom apt with a crappy refrigerator contributing to most of that cost.

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It no maky much difference, cause electricity bill here's several hundred anyway.

"If everything seems under control, you're just not going fast enough."
- Mario Andretti

Probably the $20 something a month. It's much worse having an old refrigerator or something like the heat running. The computer isn't that bad.

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