HOW MUCH ELECTRICITY IS YOUR TECH COSTING YOU?
Do you know how much your tech is costing you in electricity bills? Do you even know how to figure it out? Do you know what you can do to drop your energy bills? If not, this video is for you. First, how much juice does your tech use? Well, I’m going to use this wall plug meter – you can pick one up at the link the in description if you want for around £20 or even better something like this SmartThings plug that’ll monitor and save your energy usage 24/7. Let’s start with a monitor – pretty simple thing, and is going to use somewhere between 20 and 100W depending on the size, type and brightness. This one here runs at around 30 watts at 50% brightness. At 100% that jumps to more like 40W, but 50% is both the default and plenty bright enough so I’ll stick with that.
Next, a gaming PC. I’m gonna use the one strapped to the bottom of my desk here which is somewhat modest by today’s standards, i7 7700 and a GTX 1080 Ti. Just while idling, this is using around 100 watts. That seemed a little high, so I switched to 144Hz instead of the 165Hz the Gigabyte M32Q I’m using can do, and.. I was blown away by this. It dropped to just 45W! Down from 100W! That’s crazy and really confusing, so I fired up HWINFO and logged sensor data to see what changed. Take a look at the GPU power consumption and clock speed – it seems like at 1440p 165Hz the 1080Ti can’t drop into its low power mode and has to stay at it’s full 1.4GHz clock speed, but at 144Hz it can drop to just 139MHz to sip more like 16W instead of 65W, even while at idle!
When watching YouTube videos, it’s between 100 and 120W especially at 165Hz, and while gaming… oh boy! That’s more like 350W! So let’s say you game for 10 hours per week on average, you watch youtube another 10 and your system idles for more like 30 hours. How much would that cost you? Well you will need to look up what your energy provider charges you per kilowatt hour, but here in the UK the new cap price is right around 34p per kilowatt hour. So 10 hours of gaming at 350 watts is 3.5 kWh, and that times 34p is £1.19 per week. The same goes for watching youtube, that’s around 1 kWh, or £0.34 per week. Finally the idle time, let’s be kind and say your GPU doesn’t need to sit at full boost just to idle so we’ll pick the 45W result instead. 30 hours at 45W is 1.35kWh, or about £0.46. We can’t forget the monitor too, at 30W for all 50 hours, which comes to £0.51. So all that comes to around £2.5 per week, or around £130 per year. You know what? That’s not bad.
But what about some of your more household tech? Something like a Ring doorbell camera – according to Smart Home Point – draws between 1 and 10 watts depending on if it’s on standby or recording. Even saying it averages just 1.8W of power usage, a full year or that will cost you around £5. A single Google Home Mini uses 2W at idle, which would add £6 to your power bill annually. The worst offenders though are things that have to stay on 24/7. A Sky TV box apparently uses 9W while on standby, which would add £27 to your yearly bill. If you have an Xbox Series X and it’s still set to the “instant on” type standby, which I think it is by default, it’s sucking back around 29W all day every day. At the new 34p per kWh, that’ll cost you £86.37 per year. £86!!! That’s more than TWO ENTIRE GAMES!
Even things like your fridge are sucking back plenty of juice. For those you can look up the manufacturer’s specs, for my fridge that’s 298kWh per year, or £101.32 per year. Ouch. Things like washing machines and dishwashers surprisingly aren’t that bad, despite drawing 2kW just to heat the water. That’s because they only draw that crazy power for a few minutes, which doesn’t end up adding to much, compared to the fridge which averages something like 34Wh all day every day.
You might be surprised to learn that really high power items like kettles and microwaves don’t actually cost you that much. Again that’s because while they are drawing a lot – my “850W” microwave draws more like 1300W from the wall, and my kettle is a little over 2kW, they are only on for a few minutes at a time. The kettle takes, what, 2 minutes to boil two cups worth? Well that’s just 0.066kWh of power billed to you. A 1300W microwave running for 6 minutes is just 0.13kWh, or 4p billed.
So, to recap, to work out how much your tech is costing you, find out how much power they are using, how long you are using them, then multiply the power in kilowatts by the time and the price. Long parasitic power draws are arguably more important than short bursts like gaming – remember gaming on this 1080 Ti system only costs around £130 a year, compared to an Xbox just on standby that’s £86 per year. The more constant loads you can shut down, the better.
