The refridgerator literally has directly observable physical effects on the world - chilled wine! - and yet it uses less power than a device doing symbolic operations all day.
The refridgerator literally has directly observable physical effects on the world - chilled wine! - and yet it uses less power than a device doing symbolic operations all day.
There were a bunch of other surprises as well. The baseline load of my house is only about 200W (which seemed shockingly low to me, since I was raised in the era of 100W light bulbs), and it includes every laptop, tablet, phone, and battery charger that's plugged in; refrigerator and chest freezer; TVs and home entertainment on standby; nightlights and other small lamps we leave on; clocks & alarms; and everything else that's running continuously. Our gas heating system, however, uses 500W when on; apparently the blower is electric, and twice as much of a current draw as the rest of the baseline load. During the winter this is our biggest electricity expense, despite being "gas". Dishwashers and washing machines are basically rounding error. Household appliances like vacuum cleaners are also surprisingly low-current. Anything with a heating element is a huge draw though (1-2kW), and that includes clothes dryers, electric thermos, Instapot, microwave, oven, and toaster oven. I can tell when my wife is preparing lunch by looking at the Tesla app.
If there's one thing you can do to save energy, it's probably to dry your clothes on a rack outside rather than the clothes dryer. We've got young kids so we do a lot of laundry, but in summertime probably 2/3 of our total energy usage goes to the clothes dryer, and in winter it's split between that and the gas heating.
Here in NM, you can take a load of athletic gear laundry outside to hang up and by the time you're done hanging it, the first items are already dry :) In winter, it takes about twice as long, indoors. So .. yeah.
OTOH in Winter you may want the extra humidity.
They use only about half the energy.
If you want one, head to any shop that sells appliances, and search "heat pump". Mine paid for itself within a year. You can also buy one 2nd hand for faster payback.
Besides - power boost only affects usage when actually stressing the CPU, which for most people is rare. Gamers are probably the exception.
Sooooo, this is is one reason I'm trying to move all the crap I host on my Synology, to a Ras Pi with an SSD, so I can shut down the spinning-rust most of the time. If I don't need to bother with a BackUPS because everything I care about runs off an 18650 for several hours, that means I can keep sleeping when the generator runs out of fuel and just restart it whenever my lazy bones want to roll out of bed.
Anyway, some details and photos back from when I built it (actually I built two, and am using the 2nd one now, after the builtin video on the first died and no more mobos were available)
Also, I seemed to have lied. It was based on an i3. I'm fairly sure you can get mobos in miniITX format for at least i5 and probably i7 at this point.
https://sprinter-source.com/forums/index.php?threads/30991/#...
Some shots showing my van working setup:
https://sprinter-source.com/forums/index.php?threads/30991/p...
Also, turned out that I needed a voltage regulator between my solar DC system and the computer. The picoPSU can only handle up to 14V, but the solar system can sometimes run the voltage at 14.4V, which will shutdown the computer. Such a thing as too much sunshine! :)