PC power consumption
carpman - May 29, 2007 - 17:36
| Project: | Carbon Account |
| Version: | 5.x-1.x-dev |
| Component: | Code |
| Category: | feature request |
| Priority: | normal |
| Assigned: | Unassigned |
| Status: | active |
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Description
Hello, love this module and am building a site around it, what be a great feature would be allowing users to work out what power there computer uses.
I normally use the script at www.extreme.outervision.com/powercalc.jsp but if something like this was integrated that would be great.
cheers
#1
carpman - thanks for the feedback. It is very useful.
Is this for office/business energy/CO2 calculations?
Do you want this feature adding as a separate standalone page on which pc power can be calculated or would you actually want to feed the calculated energy consumption into a carbon account? If yes, we would need to calculate energy use per month or per year so I think we'd need to ask or adjust for the number of hours or days it is switched on.
Would you then want to subtract or ignore any overall electricity consumption numbers or meter readings that have been entered?
By the way I notice that the script calculates the continuously available power needed. However desktop PCs use far less energy than that because most of the time because they are idling. My old Intel P4 2.8MHz machine uses about 60 watts when idling.
Another crude way of doing this would be to add carbon sources for says 'Desktop PC Pentium P4' or 'Desktop PC Pentium P4 1 hour' or 'Desktop AMD Athlon 1 hour' and then users could multiply by 8 for normal working day etc. As most desktops and plus display are all going to be less than 150 watts hopefully, accuracy is not that important; most people's freezers are likely to use more energy.
It would be really good if PC power supplies were able to feed real time power consumption data back to the CPU possibly via a USB port or via an analog signal fed into the motherboard.
#2
Hello, was thinking it could be used by all not just office/business though may be more useful for a business that runs many PC, i know i have setup clients PC to run updates and checks over night, but now am looking at having the PC shutdown after doing such task,
Take point about power consumption changing depending on load, think this would need to have an average hours per day when computer is:
A. Idle
B. underload
As for already entered meter readings not sure about this will bow to your greater experience here :)
Most house holds have more than one computer now, many having home servers for things such as firewall, home theater, backup.
Also there are many variables, an average user may have a basic computer spec, but a keen gamer will have high spec with top graphics card, multi drive system with system under load for hours.
Also laptops are very different to desktops, on my laptop i use cpu scaling.
Think it may be useful to have ball park setup as you suggest with and time at idling, time under load, but also option like script to add you own components and time on idle/load.
The computer world is waking up to power consumption issues, companies running servers farms are seeing expenditure on power as area of improvement so hopefully may see improvements in calculating power usage.
With so many variables 100% accuracy is never going to be possible but but getting a good idea will be good.