Is folding causing my electricity bills?

[Futurism]

I decided to help out with F@H in recent months and used to shut down my PC when I wasn't using it mostly. However now I leave it on 24/7 folding with the GPU client and I just got an electric bill of £412.53.
I've never had a bill that high, it was bad enough when it hit the £300 mark earlier in the year.

Is folding costing me this amount of money?

I only have one PC on 24/7 folding even when I'm using it for other things usually unless gaming.

Intel E8500
4GB Crucial Ballistix
2x 8800GTS G92
Asus P5Q Deluxe

[ashleylist]

Keep in mind it is winter and we are all using more electricity. Though that does seem high, are you on direct debit or a meter?

I'm going to point out the obvious one, like trying difference electricity suppliers and insulating your house, especilly your loft and the hatch!!!

You can get a pulg thing from amazon that measures your electricity useage for around £10-15. i mean to get one my self some time.

Ash

[Futurism]

I'll point out it's a gas heated 3-bedroom bungalow, we cook with gas also and everyone is usually out in the day on weekdays. I checked other prices and tried services like uSwitch and British Gas came in cheapest. I have one of those and I've tried round the house nothing seems abnormally high. It's direct debit each month.

[P5-133XL]

My I suggest that you get/borrow an inexpensive watt-meter like a kill-a-watt and measure the direct cost. As a generallity, I assume between 300-350W for that setup. Then knowing the wattage and cost of your electricity you can determine a fairly precise cost.

monthly cost = Wattage x 792 (hours/month) / 1000 (kilo Watts) x price ( per KW Hr)

My personal machine runs 330 W and my local electricity price is 7.5 cents/KWHr
my cost = 305W x 792 (hours/month) / 1000 x ( $ 0.075 KWHr) == $18.11 US

That machine has a Q9450@3.36 and two 9600GSO's

[Tigerbiten]

I'm with Scottish on the "Online energy saver 4" package and pay by monthly direct debit and I've just done my lastest energy bill.
In the last 81 days I've used 5,210 kW
Most of that 2.7 kW.h, is used to keep the farm going.
I pay on average 8.2p per kW.h so its costs me around £150 per month to run the farm.

My Q6600 + dual 9800GTX's only pulls 350 watts from the wall measured with a Kill-a-Watt meter.
So at 8.2p per kW.h it only costs me around £20 per month to run it.
You box should be pulling slightly less, but you may be paying a little bit more, but thats probably a fairly good guess on how much it cost to run you system.

Its not the computer thats useing all the power.

Edited it to move the decimal point into the right place ........

Luck ............

[Futurism]

Wow, how do you get such a cheap rate? :O
I wish I could get it down to that, would probably help. Anyways, here's the bill;

http://www.dmb.me.uk/stuff/bg.jpg

All of the kitchen appliances are energy-rated as A also. The only things left on are the desktop for folding, Sky boxes and the fridge-freezer. Other stuff is knocked off when it's finished with. Only electric heater I have is on for 2 hours at night for one of my older dogs to keep warm with and it's not a 2kW hungry beast - 400w.

[P5-133XL]

ok so your rate is 11.528p and I'll assume 330W and what it costs to fold 24x7 is aprox:

31.63 pounds/month = 330W x 792/1000 x 0.11528 x 1.05 VAT

That's the aprox the amount you can blame folding for on your electricity bill...

Just as a side note: Your electricity bill is for 84 days not a normal 30 so that is almost three months worth. Also, it appears that previous bills were actually estimates rather than taken from actual meter readings and if the estimates are off (which is likely when entering winter and heating useage increases), then when they do a real reading the bill becomes a catchup game that can distort your monthly bill.

[Futurism]

So about £94 a quarter which is a quarter of the bill. Something seems really wrong somewhere.

[v00d00]

Leaving TVs, monitors, audio equipment, etc, on standby can send a bill high.

I use the obvious logic. Turn off the computer(s) and take a measurement over an hour of how much electricity you used in the peak of the day, do some calculations on it, what does it come to?

Im running two quads and a dual on SMP/Uni, all running 24/7 and i budget about £120/quarter for them.

[PlayLoud]

Where I live (Redondo Beach, CA, USA), we have a tiered system. If you go over a certain amount, you start paying more per Kilowatt hour. I think there are 5 tiers here. I just throw an extra $50 on to my rent, so I don't get yelled at. With the tiered system, it is too hard to decide how much the energy costs. I would prefer to pay at the lowest tier rate, but somebody else might think that my electricity usage should count as the high tier.

[toTOW]

One simple thing we could all do : replace all incandescent (or halogen) lamps by compact fluorescent lamps. They a bit more expensive to buy, but they last longer and uses about 80% energy less than incandescent ones.

[Tigerbiten]

Are you on an "Economy 7" meter which gives you cheap power overnight ?
If you are then put thing like your washing mashine on a time switch so it will run on cheap power.
Mines setup like that.

I'm probably paying the same rates as you, but I'm setup to make as much use of the cheaper night rate power.
Plus around 90% of the power bill is the farm.
If I shut the farm off and only ran a small computer I could get the power bill down to around £15-20 per month.

Luck ..........

[mdk777]

Only electric heater I have is on for 2 hours at night for one of my older dogs to keep warm with and it's not a 2kW hungry beast - 400w.

Nothing sucks electricity like an electric heater!
As you might know, nobody spoils their dogs worse than we Americans, and I'm no exception!
However, have you thought of a nice thick lamb skin rug/dog bed?
While not cheap, it would pay for itself in a couple of months in comparison to an electric heater.

I know, more advice than you were really looking for, but I thought I'd throw it out anyway.
Your post is helpful in that it gets us all started thinking about how to save power/money.

[Futurism]

Are you on an "Economy 7" meter which gives you cheap power overnight ?
If you are then put thing like your washing mashine on a time switch so it will run on cheap power.
Mines setup like that.

I'm probably paying the same rates as you, but I'm setup to make as much use of the cheaper night rate power.
Plus around 90% of the power bill is the farm.
If I shut the farm off and only ran a small computer I could get the power bill down to around £15-20 per month.

Luck ..........

No I don't think we have Economy 7 but I do time the dishwasher/washing machine for late night/dawn usually. I believe there is a cheaper duel fuel tariff I can switch to which will save about £350 a year, about one bill in the scheme of things

Thanks for all your comments, I'll see what I can do about getting rid of that heater even if it'll only save a few hours a day worth gotta be worth a try.

[bruce]

Here in California, most people still have the old mechanical electric meters. Rates vary based on total monthly use and as I've kept adding computers to my "garden" (too small to call it a "farm") the bill has gradually moved upward. Time-of-day metering is an option but the utility company doesn't take any real steps to encourage people to switch.

You have to upgrade to a new computerized meter which costs a couple dollars a month. There are only two summer and two winter tiers but if you're already getting charged high rates due to your total monthly usage, you should compare what you're paying with the TOU rates. I can easily shift my laundry/dishwasher to nights and I don't have an Air Conditioner so I won't be running it summer days, which is when they get their "pound of flesh."

They charge more 10am to 6pm M-F. Weekends and holidays are the lower rate. Summer is higher than Winter.