A reduction of over 280 Watts!!

So I finally had enough moved off of the two old servers in the basement that I could shut them down.  Last night I bit the bullet and shut them and all the external hard drives off.

The kill-a-watt dropped to 55 watts.

That remaining 55 watts is hard to get rid of: Cable modem, wireless router, Cisco 2950 switch, old 10-base-T switch (stupid Rio Audio Receivers won't link up to the cisco, even if I force it to 10/half-duplex mode) and the Net CallerID box.  And the basement 15" LCD monitor that I just realized was probably on standby...

So I guess my two old servers and their assorted external hard drives were drawing between 325 and 345 watts total.

This morning I plugged my Home Server into the Kill-a-watt meter...

At idle:   47 watts!!

Logged into the console: 50 watts!!

Turned on Folder Duplication for a 20 gb share: 62 watts!!

10 minutes later: 47 watts again!!

I am thrilled!

Here's a little math:

My old set-up was drawing between 380 and 400 watts, so let's call it 390.  How much was it costing me to run them for a year?

Well, let's turn watts over time to kwh:

390 watts * (8,760 hours per year) / 1000 = 3416.4 kilowatt-hours (kwh)

My local cost is 10.55 cents per kwh, so:

3416.4 kwh *  $ .1055/kwh = $360.43 per year, or $30.03 per month.

So what about now?  

Let's call the total rack 110 watts (55 watts of other equipment, and a high estimate of 55 watts average for the server):

110 watts * (8,760 hours per year) / 1000 = 963.6 kwh

My local cost is 10.55 cents per kwh, so:

963.6 kwh *  $ .1055/kwh = $101.66 per year, or $8.47 per month.

That is a savings of $258.77 per year, of $21.56 per month!

I didn't use all of the parts that I bought for the server (fans mostly) so I'll write up a detailed final cost analysis later today, and see how long the ROI on this is...

I am more than happy with this purchase!

Bushman