Energy Usage without the HTPC

Ok...so my HTPC "broke" last week and has been offline.  While I've been trying to troubleshoot the issues (I think I determined its the power supply), I've been able to look really how much energy it consumes.  Below is a figure from Google Powermeter which shows my energy usage before and after the HTPC is shutdown.  I would ignore Saturday and Sunday because there was a power failure at the house which messed up the readings. 

Note the "always on" power usage drops from about 8 kWh to 5 kWh.  This represents 3 kWh of savings or 125W.  That's some signficant savings!  (FYI:  Kudos to my wife who also significantly reduced power usage while I was away on business. I will mention that this is because she spent the majority of her time at her sister's place.  So minimal cooking, no TV, etc.)

So, I'd say that there's a lot of room to fix this.  As I've said in the past, updating my HTPC will significantly help power usage.  Reducing the power consumption down to 40W (which many reviews have shown modern PCs can do) could reduce HTPC power consumption by 68% reducing "always on" power consumption from 8 kWh to 6 kWh (HTPC would consume 0.96 kWh/d).  Yeah, I know someone will mention the two extremes:  "Why don't you not use the HTPC at all and save that energy?!?" or "Who cares?  That only saves you $0.1734/d or $5.27/month".  For the first question...(1) This is my hobby and I'll take the penalty.  And for (2), you're right it isn't a lot...but it's the thought that counts, right?  Plus it feeds the hobby mention in (1).   Oh...and don't forget I've already cut out a lot of the big things to do...so now I'm down to the small stuff anyway.

Misc Home Improvements

This weekend, I dug into the Duke Energy "Energy Efficiency Kit" that I was given.  I changed out some light bulbs which I hadn't done previously.  Unfortunately, the CFLs in my MBR ceiling fan flicker at night, so I'm guessing those might need to be changed back...or maybe I'll just install one bulb instead of two.

I also replaced my shower head with the new 1.5 gpm shower head.  It works great!  Not to mention my old one didn't have the rubber flow restricter installed so it was at least putting out 2.5-3 gpm previously.  This should not only save water, but more importantly, reduce the hot water usage and regen required.

I also setup my downstairs (den) HTPC frontend to go to "sleep" when i shut it off.  That saves me about 32W of 24/7 power reducing it from 40W to 8W.  It's not zero, but still a nice reduction.

Next up...I'll be upgrading the main HTPC (which uses about 100W @ idle).  To do this, I need to pretty much need to rebuild the main components (cpu/mobo/memory).  Rumor has it the AMD "bulldozer" will be optimal when it comes out in June/July.  And that is supposed to idle around 10-20W which is a healthy reduction in power usage.