electrical surprises
After my last energy-related post, I bought a cool little device that allows me to measure power consumption of everyday electrical devices. I've been testing various computers, appliances and electronics that I have or have access to, in order to discover just how power hungry they are.
Some of the surprises included my Pentium 4 file server which uses only about 40 W, a dual processor Pentium III server which uses a whopping 175 W, and a small stereo system which uses about 22 W in standby mode! Just how much power do you need to watch for a button press from the remote control?!
Interesting statistics after the jump.
Nintendo Wii: 19 W while gaming, 10 W in standby.
Cisco 2811 router: 35 W
Cisco 2851 router: 38 W
Athlon64 3500 based desktop: 111 W
Athlon64 3500 with freq. scaling on: 108 W
Dell 21" CRT monitor: 80 W
Sony 27" television: 68 W
13 W CF lightbulb: 12 W
Paper shredder: 386 W while shredding
HP LaserJet 4000: ~ 580 W while printing
small electric heater: ~1250 W
average A/C adapter: 2-3 W with nothing connected
Fortunately, the devices with the highest rates of energy consumption are used infrequently. The Pentium III server used to be always-on, but after I found out how power hungry it is, I repurposed it as a development server that only runs when needed. I'm working on getting software-suspend working on my Athlon64 [Linux] desktop so I can suspend it when I walk away instead of leaving it on all the time. I think the $20 spent on this cool little tool was well spent!
