Go Green in Your Home

For those of you wanting to know how much power is your computer drawing? A typical personal computer’s power consumption is 300 watts not including your computer monitor! You can open your desktop computer’s case and look at your computer’s power supply ratings. You don’t have to be a computer expert to do this, all you need to do is remove 1 -2 screws on the back of your computer tower, and the side panel will slide off. There will be a big square box on the top rear of the tower where your power cord connects. This is your computer’s power supply. There will be a label on the power supply saying how many watts it outputs.

Most personal desktop computers will have a power usage of 250 – 1200 watts, depending on what that computer was designed for. If you have a high-end gaming computer you will probably have at least a 550 watt power supply in your computer.

So how much energy does a computer use? A lot! I’ve seen some people ask does leaving a computer on use less energy? Quick answer, no. If your computer is turned on it is using energy, even if the computer is idle and no one is using it, your computer will still be using energy! So be sure to turn off your computer when no one is using it. A typical computer only takes maybe 30 seconds to turn on.

How to Save Energy with Computer

For a typical computer user you don’t need anything high-end. You can buy an energy efficient computer or a green computer! There are many energy efficient computers on the market that work great. My favorite is the IONITX computer. This computer typically comes with 65 – 90 watt power supply, but usually doesn’t consume all these watts. The IONITX also has either a single or a dual-core 1.6GHz Atom CPU, which makes it fast! The nVIDIA ION GPU in the IONITX board is basically a nVIDIA GeForce 9400 GPU, which makes this computer have fast graphics. This IONITX computer is capable of playing 1080p HD videos, playing games, internet, e-mail, office, etc. IONITX board has Wi-Fi built in, LAN, VGA, DVI, HDMI, and many more ports.

There are also many other green computers, you could use any computer that is powered by the Atom CPU. These computers hardly use any electricity, but the IONITX is far more powerful and uses about the same amount of electricity!

You can also buy a laptop computer! Most high-end laptop computers will have a 65 – 90 watt power supply. Which is the same as the IONITX but on a laptop computer this 90 watts power supply is powering your monitor as well! If you are using a laptop, try to run your laptop on the battery as much as possible to save energy!

For those computer users that demand more power for video editing or extreme graphic intense games, I suggest a high-end laptop or just remember to turn off your desktop computer when you are not using it. Most computer owners will leave their computer on 24/7, which consumes a lot of power!

Below is a chart comparing a typical desktop computer running 24/7, the same typical desktop computer running 16 hours a day (just shut off when sleeping), and the same typical computer running only 8 hours a day. This is based off of a 250 watt desktop, 132 watt 17″ LCD monitor, 4 watt computer speakers, and 0.10/kWh. You can look at your kWh usage charges on your electric bill to see what you are actually paying per kWh. So we are using a total of 386 watts.

So you can see just turning off your computers will greatly save you money on your electricity bill. Next, I will show you a chart comparing the same typical desktop, IONITX, typical laptop computer, and an Atom-Based laptop running 24 hours, 7 days a week! Most of you after seeing the chart above will turn off your PC at least at night, but for those that don’t here is a chart comparing your typical desktop with an IONITX running 24/7. I will even use the same monitor and speakers for both personal computers.

	Typical Desktop/Monitor	Dual Core IONITX/Monitor	Dual Core Laptop	Single Core Atom Laptop
Cost/Day	$0.93	$0.40	$0.22	$0.03
Cost/Month	$28.26	$12.15	$6.59	$0.88
Cost/Year	$339.06	$145.81	$79.06	$10.54

As you can see in the chart above that the laptops that use the single core Atom CPU are the most energy efficient computer. The laptops that use the Atom CPU and Intel chipsets are set to use no more than 12 watts of power, such as the Acer Aspire One, HP Mini, ASUS EeePC, Dell Inspiron Mini, MSI Wind, Lenovo IdeaPad S-Series, and pretty much any other Atom netbook! The power supplies that power these Atom based laptop generally are a rated for higher wattages, but these laptops only consume 12 watts. When your battery is dead and you are charging your Atom based laptop, you will consume a little more power.

The Atom based laptops are also very light and ultra portable. Their battery life is amazing, and they are also a very low cost laptop! So go green and buy one of these cheap laptops! They are chep to buy and also cheap to run!

If you are wanting to go green and save money in your home by using energy efficient computers I would highly suggest using an Atom based laptop run on battery as much as possible, and turn it off when you are not using it! For more tips on how to save electricity or any other ways to go green, continue reading through Go Green in Your Home!