[gavo]

Hello All,

Since we got our Owl electricty monitor we have become , well, dare I say it, obsessive about our electricty cnsumption - we know what our "standard running" cost is and anything over that and we're on the hunt for anything left switched on. To be fair it has saved us a few pennies, especially since our elecricity company - Airtricity - (we're in N.I. so we only have a choice of two !) sneaked in a 20% price rise.
Anyhow - being energy miserly didn't mean that we couldn't be without a PC. With our trusty eight year old Pentium 4 showing signs of imminent death we decided to go on the search for something more up to date and energy efficient. This is what we found - http://www.ocdistribution.com/ - it's the Xi3 modular PC.
We've had it now for a couple of weeks and the electricty monitor hardly notices it - using just 20 watts of power and what is even better is that with it's Tandem software - it can run as two PC's ! So now our two squabbling teenage daughters can use it at the same time.  Result.
Oh, and even just to look at it it's very cool.

[Bionic]

Looks interesting

[mab]

20W  that's less than my laptop!

Hmm.. not too cheap though.

m

[gavo]

Indeed but 1) we needed a new PC, 2) we got two PC's more or less for the price of one and 3) the leccy bill is not really affected.
And the fact that you can literally run over this thing says oodles about it's build quality.

[Plantoid]

I find this thread interesting ,
if I may I'd like to slide it side ways and ask if any of you readers have  got one of the latest tablets that are set to replace the old conventional PC & lapptops ?
 
 I'm led to understand that their power consumption is absolutely miniscule but don't know anything about consumption of add- ons like printers , keyboards , external hard drives  and big 23 inch monitiors ... anyone care to comment?

[Dan]

That's pretty impressive.

We have an effergy meter, although its batteries ran out a long time ago.     When it was running I became obsessive about usage. It was really handy though, since we were not long into the new house and getting used to the ground source heat pump and other new equipment.

Plantoid, an iPad uses around 2.5 watts on average. The 27" iMac on my desk uses 141 watts when running full steam. Most domestic printers are idle for 99+% of the time, and in sleep mode will be drawing almost nothing.

[Small Farmer]

The consumption of a computer will vary according to how hard it is working but an idling Mac mini draws 13W

Does anyone with PV know if there is a way of getting reliable energy readings. When the PV is generating ours are wrong.