August 19, 2008 on 10:00 pm | In Gadgets, Madness, Tech |

So in my nice new flat by the sea, I’ve swapped to a reasonably ‘green’ power supplier Southern Electric who can supply power from their hydro-electric power stations oop north, so it’s reasonably guilt free. However - it still costs money, green or not, so they also give you a power meter that tells you how many Watts you’re using, how many you’ve used over the last day, week and month. All very good and geeky - I like!

But, I was quite surprised how much power was being used overnight - 130 Watts! Even when a lot of stuff was supposed to be ‘off’. Fortunately the meter updates pretty quickly - about every 10 seconds - and so on Sunday morning I had a grand ’switch off’ and then turned on just one thing at a time and built up a handy table of what power was being used on standby (or on if it would be left on, like the ADSL router).

• Oven 0
• Boiler 0
• Fridge 3
• iMac 15 plugged in - not on or asleep! Up to 130 on, 87-ish idle
• Bebox (ADSL/Wifi router) 10-12
• Apple Time capsule 45-28
• 6 way posh surge protected Ppower strip 31
• 6 way not so posh surge protected power strip 0
• Tv 105 on, 17 standby
• Sky HD 41 standby
• Xbox 15 standby
• Mac mini 14 just plugged in
• Wii 13 stdby
• network drive 11 just plugged in
• Av switch 0
• Remote charger 0 off 10 charging

A couple of BIG shocks in there for me:

• One 6 way adaptor took up 30 watts!!! That’s just mental - needless to say I swapped that out right away.

• I’d heard that TVs used up quite a bit of power on standby but I always assumed that was old TVs, not mine — how wrong I was, it eats up 15 watts on standby. Very naughty!
• Even naughtier were the computers that used up 15 watts each without even being turned on even slightly! Just being switched on at the socket, nowt else, 15 watts! I’ve got two computers so that’s another 30 watts I can get rid off just by turning things off at the socket.
• They Sky box is very naughty and just hoovers up power when supposedly ‘on standby’ - I know Sky would like me to keep this on overnight to download stuff, but it’s just too much, it’s going off overnight as that’s the same as leaving a 40 watt lightbulb on all night!
• However its not all bad - the fridge, oven, boiler and some chargers were actually pretty good and took either no or very little power when not in use. Hooray!

So, what have I done, armed with my new ‘power facts’? I’ve got most of my tech in one corner on a couple of power strips, so I’ve got a couple of new power strips that are surge protected BUT have a switch on each socket! So, I can keep various game consoles plugged in but not turned on, until I actually want them. I’ve also set it up so that I can turn off one of the power strips at the wall overnight, so the Sky box and TV don’t eat up power overnight.

For the Macs, I’ve found a useful widget that allows them to ‘deep sleep’ which is the same as ‘hibernate’ on Windows - it means I can save the state to disk and then turn the power off, and its still pretty fast to come back on when I need it. Not as quick as before - which was about 3 seconds, compared to about 30-40 seconds. But I can wait, when its saving so much power.

So now, I’m using about 80 watts less than before - even when everything’s on! Overnight I’ve saved two thirds of the power - about 120 watts! So I should only have about 20-30 watts overnight. That’s great, and all I have to remember to do is just turn off a switch overnight.

Anyway that’s my probably over long and dull post about saving power, money and the planet. Go out and get yourself a power meter and be shocked about how much your favorite gadgets are using!