Wasting energy begins at home
Every time our local power company is shuffled between holding companies, they raise their rates a little bit to cover the costs of the loans, lawyers, and golden parachutes each transaction spins off. Our local PUC, which used to have some reputation as a regulator, has been hobbled to the point where all they are capable of doing is stamping [OK!] on the rate increases, with the expected result that our monthly energy bills have doubled in the last 8 years without any extraordinary changes in our monthly power consumption.
One of the things I've been doing in my attempts to bring down the power bills is that I bought a pair of kill-a-watt power meters, and I've been running around attaching them to various pieces of computer hardware. It's, um, enlightening, but not in a particularly good way; when I first brought in the k-a-w units, I was running three machines in the basement -- a P3/500, a K7/900, and a K7/1300, all attached through a kvm switch to an old Amdek VGA display (they used to be attached to a rackmounted ViewSonic LCD display, but we're in PGE territory and the power supply for that monitor died in one of our (frequent) power outages -- which turned out to be eating something on the order of 300w or US$23.75/month (300w * 720hr * US$.00011 per kwh) plus another PC in the library (P3/933 + SGI 1600sw) that eats ~100w or US$8/month.
Leaving aside the tiny detail that the rest of the house is consuming between 700 and 1000 kwh every month, this is a lot of power that's being eaten up by PCs. Ugh. I was thinking of upgrading downbelow to a P4 platform (like the little half-size P4 board that I bought to replace the factory case when I realized that a VIA C3/533 + SuSE + KDE + firefox ran like a drunken slug on that platform. I can't run Mastodon there because I don't have kernel support for the ethernet device, ACPI power management, and a raft of other things that have been stuffed onto motherboards since Linux 2.0.28 was released. And, no, R*dh*t wasn't any better on the performance front) but that fairly sedate P4/1800 motherboard consumes 75 watts just by itself; toss in the two-port ethernet card and the two disks on downbelow and I don't think I'll save any electricity over the old and inefficient K7/900) but instead I think I might just strip the motherboard out of the factory case (VIA EPIA 5000 -- 10.4w when running) and make downbelow a little bit slower for Jesus.
I don't know what I'll do with the PC in the library. The new Pentium M descendants that Apple uses in their new Macintels are supposed to be very energy efficient, but it's fairly difficult to dig out the wattage requirements for them. Older motherboards might be gratifyingly efficient, but they won't deal gracefully with modern big hard disks, and will take approximately 300 years to run fsck on the 160gb disks that are now the standard server disks at home. I'd offsource data storage to the datacenter where Pell and Gehenna live, but that would make getting to my data a very slow process.
Perhaps I will get an array of photoelectric panels. If I can get about 200watts worth of solar panel, that will give me ~150watts * 10 hours/day * 30 days/month == 45kwh, which might be enough to run downbelow + the backup server off-grid if I replace the system boards in them with low-power boards and use 12v-input power supplies (to avoid the power losses from going 12vdc->120vac->12vdc+5vdc+3.3vdc) fed directly off the batteries. It would cost about US$1200, but there is something to be said for taking some of the hobby power consumption off our monthly power bills.