Selfsufficientish.com

Hi,

Being a bit of a geek I tend to run several computers. However I'm conscious of the amount of power I must be using up - is there any way to run them off a more ecological or cheaper power supply, or is my best bet to look for a greener electricity supplier?

All depends on your curcumstanes mate do you own or rent and if you own do you have space for a wind turbine or solar pannels? You can buy solar pannels that will recharge a laptop if you can't go teh whole hog, likewise you could switch to ecotricity a wind powered electricity company http://www.ecotricity.co.uk/, they also agree to charge you the same ammount as you are already paying.

BTW welcome to the site mate, is it Northampton UK you are from? Thats my home town if it is, where abouts are you? Dave lives in semilong.

nickd wrote:Hi,

Being a bit of a geek I tend to run several computers. However I'm conscious of the amount of power I must be using up - is there any way to run them off a more ecological or cheaper power supply, or is my best bet to look for a greener electricity supplier?

Hi, in the spirit of reduce, reuse , recycle, had you thought about running less computers ?
Seriously, i'm a geek professionally, I run most of my(home) systems off of old headless laptops inc Open/Freebsd/linux machines and the odd windows box.
My fav solution is to use something like vmware - I used to run multiple machines but really, theres not much point. If you're running servers at home then fine, but an old low-power laptop with BSD on it will server you just fine in my experience. - Failing that, ecotricity or good-energy !

Anonymous wrote:Hi, in the spirit of reduce, reuse , recycle, had you thought about running less computers ?

It's not *that* many, sort of, basically six, with the occasional other one turned on if I need to test something. The vast majority run Linux, so I'm hoping that the efficiency of the OS ( AFAIK ) will cause the systems to draw less power.

Laptops allegedly draw less power from their batteries under Linux, so I'm hoping that's the same for Desktops.

Anonymous wrote: Seriously, i'm a geek professionally, I run most of my(home) systems off of old headless laptops inc Open/Freebsd/linux machines and the odd windows box.
My fav solution is to use something like vmware - I used to run multiple machines but really, theres not much point. If you're running servers at home then fine, but an old low-power laptop with BSD on it will server you just fine in my experience. - Failing that, ecotricity or good-energy !

As for "something like vmware", what do you use, qemu?

And yes, eco-electricity is high up on the "to do" list.

nickd wrote:It's not *that* many, sort of, basically six...

<pause>

That's six times more than most people seem to need.

If you are really concerned about efficiency, maybe one top end computer would be able to replace several older, more inefficient, less productive units.

Still, I suppose your winter heating bills are comparitively low.

I suppose if I asked why you would need more than one computer on at a time I wouldn't understand the answer.

Maybe instead of a windturbine you could connect a cycle generator to your computers? Keeps you from turning into a couch (or rather desk) potato, too...

Ina

nickd wrote: As for "something like vmware", what do you use, qemu?

And yes, eco-electricity is high up on the "to do" list.

Vmware it is, although I find i'm running less and less stuff at home (although, i've got 2 rackmount monsters next to me at the moment that i'm setting up for work (like sitting next to an aeroplane..so damn noisy).

I run vmware on an old dell server box at my company warehouse to sit in for a bunch of machines and fairly light processes that would ordinarily run on several machines.

I found qemu a bit slow on my hardware ( most of my day to day stuff is done on a five year old P3 500 laptop - albeit with a boatload of memory (which is far better than a faster processor for general day to day stuff).
I run vmware on this laptop although I find i'm using a shared server (another old low power dell server) to develop on ( myself and my colleague work from home (although he's in paris and, well, I'm somewhere less glamourous and we have a devbox in our rack that we work on remotely.

The fastest computer that i personally own is a 1.2 Ghz Duron thats about 4 years old - that I hardly ever use (was my "games" machine).
The latest greatest machines are ridiculous (unless you like the latest 3d games). The processor speeds are stupid for a desktop machine (and the power requirements are quite heavy).

Sitting around me at the moment, I have 19 computers with a 1u rackmount and a Quad 550 Dell (filing cabinet) downstairs (i'll post a pic of this computing stupidity if anyones interested ! - I am surrounded by computing crap). I'm not a fanatic, but being in the business, you tend to aquire machines over the years (although 5 of the above mentioned are for work ( I was never a good ebayer)
In the last 2 years I've thrown out mini-fridge size dual processor fujitsu server, 2 DEC Alpha workstations, a quad cpu compaq (big mistake to buy compaq servers - although I stripped it first (i'm also surrounded by useless "parts" as well) plus a couple of PC's and I also have at least 3 machines belonging to me at the warehouse - ridiculous !

Needless to say, I dont have many(or indeed any) of them running - nearly all my day to day tasks are done on one laptop that i now switch off when i'm done.

If you like the idea of small cheap low power computers, check out the "via eden" range of processors and motherboards. They are very low power and tiny - whilst being more than adequate powered for a desktop computer (or anything else other than the latest games) - have a look at http://www.mini-itx.com if you're interested.

anyway, enough rambling about my technical and environmental nightmare.

needless to say - having too many machines is not big and its not clever !
For the sake of your sanity - throw them out ! (or of course, as i'm now considering)....FreeCycle !

Getting slightly back on topic... I Just switched from Npower (the juice scheme) to Ecotricity - but i've yet to have my first bill (which aparently wont be any more than any other supplier). Unfortunatly, its not the "old" tarif (whereby i think 100% of your leccy was green, I think only 30% is green on the new tarrif however, they are investing in windfarms and the like, so they're welcome to my money.

oh, i forgot to mention, if you like linux, then instead of running multiple machines, setup linux virtual machines instead. The you can mess and experiment to your hearts content without trashing your other "virtual machines" - and of course, less physical machines and power required.

If you try out FreeBSD (my favourite platform) then checkout "Jails" - I use them all the time to partition single machines into multiple servers.

See, I told you I wouldn't understand! Vegetables, yes, computers, NO!

And you're running lcd monitors yes? (or just one monitor - you can connect to them to find out what they're doing instead of running multiple monitors)

Unplug things that don't need to run - I have a mini-itx (it can run on a 60w power supply) with the cd and floppy drive disconnected. I only connect them if/when I need them which is very seldom.

Heck depending on what you're doing you could dump the harddrive - use DSL (D*** small linux) and run everything from ram)