Light bulb test bank - can it extend to energy monitoring de

Fri 12 Jan 2007, 20:14

A mini ITX board (I'd forgotten what the VIA chipsets/boards were called) with that sort of ram and disk and consuming only 21 watts - impressive.

But what is its embedded energy cost compared to my idea of utilising older generation laptops with duff screens or keyboards (the usual items to fail and which can usually be externally connected via one of those switches allowing a single monitor, mouse and keyboard to operate a number of computers, as currently set up) may still be highly efficient use of resources rather than buy a new system. For most server and firewall applications in homes or small businesses, processor speeds of anything much above 300mhz are largely wasted, though increasing the RAM memory makes the largest impact. But when I was still "working" (i.e. for money as opposed to unpaid and economically unrecognised kid care, i.e. the "reproduction of the future labour value" as Unk Karl once put it!) I found it almost impossible to persuade small business' that utilising that collection of old 90mhz pentiums in the cupboard would be more than enough for their purposes (as one died simply pull another one out and clone the backup onto it etc.). A major part of the psychology of the throwaway society is also turning into the gross overperformance society.

At least two of the desktops in use here have been de-clocked in the setup as 1ghz is more than enough for the simple websurfing/email/wordprocessing they are used for. 2.5ghz is simply silly and consumes watts of power to no practical purpose apart from space heating.

It will be interesting to see what effect upon wattage consumption declocking modernish motherboards to "track" real use loading requirments will have.

I think a lot of people in a town like Charlbury, which has a high takeup of broadband internet and computers per household, might be in for a surprise when they see how much of their annual energy hit is taken up by the most banal of the "internet access" functions. If doing video editing then one can always reboot, set the clock speed to max, do it, then reset it to tickover, but this would require a bit of an education program for most users...

However, if "we" were to construct our own town Combined Heat and Power Station - Charlbury is almost the optimal size for one of these if I recall my research into this in the 70s correctly - then collectively it might concentrate our minds somewhat on our individual needs. I DO wonder just how much longer the "national grid" is going to continue to be viable as the age of oil runs out?

I suspect only about 30 or so years, well within the lifetime of most of the people around at present.