Inorp

Electricity costs is a big and growing issue within the IT world. The fact that larger server parks consume large amounts of electricity is given, however how often do you calculate how much electricity that server you got running somewhere in your house is actually consuming? Here’s my findings in this subject, having a small server currently running barely any load. The question is if its worth even having it running at all.

According to this article from the University of Waterloo, a 40 watt fluorecent overhead lamp draws more power overnight then a modern PC running in safe mode. My guess is that this applies to a client computer and that it would be hard to have a server unit run in safe mode (given that there are some server-load).

An actual electricity measurment would be prefferable, but in my case I have no such tools, and I am willing to settle for an estimate on the consumtion of my servers.

Given the PSU-calculator on this site, the old server computer should draw around 119w / hour. Which totals to around 85 Kw’s per month and around 1020 Kw’s per year.

No monitors, only the server hardware and perhaps some usb devices attached.