Home Automation Power Consumption

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Phil Clayton

New Member
My First time post here at Cocoontech.

OK, I purchased this very cool Kill-a-Watt meter, and Obsessed now with measuring everything in my house.
I find my present Headless Server running HomeSeer Ver 1.7 "Sips" a lean 58watts of current in an idle state, and when some event happens like turning on a an X10 lamp or something can spike to about 110watts for a few seconds, and then return to normal. The Motherboard is an older Aopen with a AMD Athalon 1.6 Mhz, and 1GB RAM, 20GB HD.

Quite happy with this but being the Geek/Nurdy type I am looking for ways to cut power consumption in my HA setup.
One is that Awful TIVO I have it sucks about 100watts 24/7, the drive never stops and the CPU is obviously running full throttle as the whole case is hot to the touch. Very poor design.

Curious if other users have measured what Current their HA Computers are consuming..
 
My equipment rack averages about 760 watts. But that's all of the servers and network equipment. My office with a laptop and an iMac takes under 200 watts most of the time, with spikes depending on what I'm doing. The HP 4500 laser printer takes like 1100 watts when warming up.

Hmm, I use a LOT of power. :huh: I am scared to see what my in floor heat boiler takes this winter. It has *three* 60 amp circuits going to it.
 
I've just built a new "do it all" machine for my house. Perviously I wasn running an old P4 machine as my CQC server and my Sage server. Now I am running a quad core machine which acts as my WHS, Sage server, and CQC server. It probably doesn't save me any energy, but now I can expand into commercial skipping :huh:

I have a killawatt and I need to put it on the new machine to see what it tyically pulls.

You could always look at a SageTV set up to replace your TIVO. Then you could run everything on the one machine and perhaps use the low power SageTV extenders to actually view the material on the TVs.
 
This actually really concerns me running 3 hai panels, 3 power supplies, all there switches witht htere nifty LED's, and a HP home server for the web componment. I have to wonder how much this convience is costing me.

Funny thing is I looked at occupancy sensors I think will cost me more to run than save me in power especally if I use LED bulbs.

Wish I lived in an area where I could do solar.
 
What I finally did was get a used Motherboard with embedded Cyrix C7 processor on board, 1Ghz CPU, and 512MB Ram included all for $25. These Processor like The Intel Atom use very little current 11-20 watts.
Actually purchased 2 of these one for a spare. But i now run my whole Homeseer on this Motherboard, and the amazing parts is it uses about 23watts of power under load with an 80GB Hard Drive included.
Beats buying a HomeSeer solid state box hands down..
 
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