How much power does your desktop PC use?

The Zonbu team make a big deal out of the low power consumption of the hardware they sell.

Not only does low power consumption have financial and ecological benefits, but it conveniently lets them chase the Toyota Prius (and amazingly Lexus LS hybrid) “I want to be ecological because its fashionable” crowd. Now I’ve got nothing against being eco-friendly, but I’ll be honest, I’m taking a serious look at this because, like many of you out there, I am alarmed by rising energy costs.

Presumably, the idea of fashion conscious buyers wasn’t lost on them either as they separately sell various “skins” to make your Zonbu all pretty or at least to make it match your handbag and your lap dog.

Where were we? Ah yes, power consumption…

According to the Zonbu Website the unit consumes a paltry 15 watts of power during “average” use. They quote third party statistics as saying that a typical desktop computer consumers 175 watts of power while performing similarly average tasks.

A Challenge for the Zonbu Marketers

I challenge the Zonbu marketing staff to come forth and share with the community where they got their numbers for average desktop PC watt consumption and total average kilowatt hours per year consumed.

Not that I necessarily think they’re not accurate, it’s just good science to be upfront about something so central to your theme. At first I was lulled in to believing one of the many links around the usage table on their green page must have supplied the data, but I took a look and couldn’t find it. Where did that data come from?

I’m no scientist or eco-crusader, but I do happen to have a power usage meter at home. I decided to use my Kill-A-Watt meter to see what my home desktop was consuming. I figured it had to be more than the stat on the Zonbu website.

I expected the figure to be quite high because my home system has a 430 watt power supply, an AMD Athlon 3800+ 2.4Ghz processor, a very high end ATI graphics card (the kind with dual power connectors and lots of warnings about power requirements), as well as dual optical drives, and multiple hard drives (I think there are three in there). On top of that its powering dual on-board LAN ports, on-board audio and 2GB of RAM. All in all a pretty hefty home system. Certainly more than “average” in my experience. It’s also about 3 years old. So I must draw more than the “average” system that Zonbu references, right?

I plugged the meter in and let it run for a while before checking the load.

As I write this, it is reading 147 watts, or just under 10x the stated power draw of the Zonbu. I have to say I’m somewhat shocked that its that low, based on the equipment I have connected. I’m essentially idle writing this in FireFox. I’ll fire up Rhapsody and see if it makes any difference but I suspect not. Of course things like MSN Messenger and Skype were also in my tray, as well as the FreeAVG virus scanner, the Java console and perhaps one or two other little apps.

Interestingly, the disk access involved in loading Rhapsody caused the consumption to spike to 160 watts momentarily. I wonder if writing to compact flash has the same result or not? You’re not moving any parts so my guess is no, but thats why we have measurement tools.

Running Rhapsody has cost me considerably. I’m constant at 159 watts of draw. I forgot that Rhapsody is going to stream in audio that is going to keep the network card busy as well as the processor, decoding the music stream (presumably some Real Networks proprietary format). I wonder how much of the modest processing power the Zonbu offers will be consumed by running Rhapsody while I attempt to web-surf? That will be interesting to see.

So the good news is I’m not consuming as much power as I feared.

The bad news is I’m beginning to think the number on the Zonbu site might be a bit generous in their favour.

Well, they probably included the monitor in the PC measurement, right? Ok, well following that logic they would need to include it in the Zonbu measurement, at least to compare apples to apples. So let me see, I took arts math in high school, but if I add the same thing to both sides doesn’t one cancel the other out?

Or maybe its a more general measurement including using various office applications too? Although I can’t imagine that word/excel, once loaded, put any serious draw on the CPU until you ask them to do something complex. I guess we’ll wait and see what the Zonbu people say…

The real takeaway is the load on standby.

I think I’m like most people in that I don’t like to wait for my PC to boot up when I wander over to do something with it.

I utilize the “Standby” mode in Windows XP to put my computer in to a light sleep so I can awaken it on short notice and resume working. Occasionally it asks me to spoon, but we’re beyond that stage of our relationship…

What I discovered, after the Kill-A-Watt was in place, is that my PC is sucking back 6 watts of power just idling in standby mode. Wow. Thats only mildly less than the low end (8 watts) of what PC Magazine said their Zonbu unit was drawing while in use.

Put in perspective, it sounds like replacing my desktop PC with a Zonbu for the 80% of the time I’m using my PC for web browsing would allow me to cut my energy usage for that same period to 1/10th of my current load. Moreover, depending on what the standby load is for the Zonbu, I may be able to experience similar savings when in standby (most of the day while I’m at work and all through the evening).

Real Savings.

As I stated previously, my local rate for power is eye-popping at ~$0.40/kilowatt hour.

Bear in mind most American consumers are paying something on the order of $0.15/kilowatt hour or less, and it may vary with time of day, so do your own calculations. Also, bear in mind that we burn fossil fuels to generate power so rising oil costs aren’t just hitting you at the pumps – watch for a “fuel surcharge” on your utility bill.
I don’t currently have any easy way to break out what portion of my monthly energy bill goes to my desktop PC, but the relative savings based on 80% of my load being done at 1/10 of the draw, will rapidly translate in to serious reductions in my energy bill.

Once Zonbu steps up and tells us the source of their “average annual usage in kilowatt hours” we can explore the real dollar savings. I’m looking foward to it.

Regardless, no matter how you slice it, there are real savings to be had here.

-Mr. Zonbu

P.S.

I live in a warm climate and we run A/C all year long. If we didn’t, I think I’d melt from the humidity. Therefore the actual heat my desktop PC displaces contributes directly to my overall energy consumption as I need to expel the hot air and replace it with cool air. While the Zonbu does generate some heat, it will add a lot less to my overall household load, and therefore lead to potentially lower A/C loading – the single biggest consumer of energy in our home. That “secondary” savings could actually eclipse the savings of the device itself.

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