Cost of Powering Your PC

Posted on February 16, 2007 5 Comments

The cost of leaving your PC on

Have you ever wondered how much it’s costing you to leave a computer on 24 hours a day, 7 days a week?
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Here’s the kilowatt-hour calculation for my server, which draws ~160 watts: 160 watts * (8,760 hours per year) / 1000 = 1401.6 kilowatt-hours

The other thing you’ll need to know is how much you’re paying for power in your area. Power here in California is rather expensive and calculated using a byzantine rate structure. According to this recent Mercury News article, the household average for our area is 14.28 cents per kilowatt-hour. 1401.6 kilowatt-hours * 14.28 cents / 100 = $200.15 So leaving my server on is costing me $200 / year, or $16.68 per month. My home theater PC is a bit more frugal at 65 watts. Using the same formulas, that costs me $81 / year or $6.75 per month.

Power could cost more than servers, Google warns: “A Google engineer has warned that if the performance per watt of today’s computers doesn’t improve, the electrical costs of running them could end up far greater than the initial hardware price tag.”

Related: The Price of Performance – Intel inside again for new Google servers – Google builds own servers to cut costs – Google to Push for More Electrical Efficiency in PC’s