How much power does a pc consume when encoding video?

[nick101181]

I was just wondering how much it actually costs to use my pc when I encode video? This is not a video question but rather a question and electricity and pirce. where I live they charge 5 cents per kilowatt hour. I usually turn off my monitor when I'm encoding anyway. where I live they have high power bills and they want to shift the blame on me for encoding video for say 6 or 10 hours at a time. So could anyone give me an idea of how much more or less it costs? I saw somewhere someone said 15 cents for 24 hours with the monitor on and 7 cents without the monitor being on. Does anyone have any idea? Thanks in advance.

[gmatov]

Probably 1/2 a buck a day.

This is one reason I won't allow SETI or "Protein Folding" to be installed on my machine.

Hey, it's bad enough I'm burning electric, which I pay for and get the benefit of, but to let some University use ALL my idle CPU cycles for garbage?

They run your machine at full cap when you log off. You pay the bill.

Besides, if there IS anyone out there, how do we know they don't want to eat us? Why should we give them a beacon to home in on? Does "Battlefieldd Earth", by L. Ron Hubbard ring a bell?

No thanks.

Cheers,

George

[zzyzzx]

First off, 5 cents/Kwh is real cheap. Even the 8 cents/Kwh I pay (or whatever one pays in Baltimore) is considered relatively cheap.

Let's do the math. Assuming that it's using 250W continously (it's using less than this with the monitor off) for 10 hours:

250 x 10 = 2500 or 2.5KW ~ 12.5 cents for 10 hours of encoding.

Since that's a conservative estimate 10 cents might be a more realistic figure.

And if they have high power bills they should get a programmable thermostat or add insulation or efficient lighting, or at least do something else that makes sense.

[Roundabout]

Where I live they charge 5 cents per kilowatt hour.

Wow, you're lucky to get electricity so cheap!! Here it's 12 - 14c/Kwh before taxes! I used to get it cheaper from Enron here before they went belly up in the fiasco a couple of years ago. I signed up with them back when deregulation first began and stayed with them until they were gone.

Anyway, to your question, I have run my PC 24 hrs. a day, 7 days a week since I got cable internet access, downloading from eMule constantly (you have to, in order to ever get anything off eMule). I wondered what kind of impact it would have on my electric bill, even though I figured that since it only uses 250 watts, it couldn't be too bad. Doing that math, 250w X 4 Hrs = 1 Kwh = $0.12 X 6 (24 hrs.) = $0.72/day X 30 days = $21.00/month.

I haven't really noticed the difference on my bill, yours would be about half as much if you left it on 24 hours a day all month, since you're paying about half as much per Kwh.

Things like refrigerators, hair dryers, toasters, air conditioners, etc. use far more power than PC's (depending on how much they are run). Your PC's monitor probably uses more power than your PC when it's on, if you look at the back of it and see what the wattage rating is. I use a LCD monitor that barely uses any power, so that doesn't make any difference to speak of on my electric bill.

Even most TV's will use more power than a PC, and people tend to leave those on all the time without thinking about it. So I wouldn't worry too much about the impact of your PC running and encoding all night. But when you turn the monitor off, use the power switch on the front of it, don't just let it go into standby on it's own. Some of the electronics are still running during that time and consuming some power, so to minimize the power usage, just switch it off completly.

[nick101181]

Thanks for the help guys