I'm looking at retiring in the next 8-15 years -- will I be able to afford the power bill to keep gaming then?
That's a legit question.
I recently installed a
Sense in my house - partially because I was curious, partially because my electric bills are through the freakin' roof (thank you California and PG&E).
My computers (and associated electronics) are fully 30% of my electric consumption. I don't run air conditioning, I don't have electric heat or hot water. My biggest electrical load, by far, are the computers in my house. I do not mine cryptocurrency, I do not run DG projects. The computers do usually stay on, but are set to sleep fairly aggressively, and sleep when not in use.
I do have 4 full gaming rigs (my own, wife, and son, plus one older unit that the son uses when he has friends over), 2 laptops, 3 consoles, 1 NAS, a few small gigabit switches here and there, and Starlink isn't exactly dainty on power. That all adds up, especially when you have all of that on UPSes, those pull power too.
Now, I have an unusually high amount of computer equipment from a typical household (although compared to this community - not so much), but none of it gets used in an usual manner - gaming, browsing, office/school work, streaming content - that's about it. No external servers running 24/7, the NAS does stays on 24/7 as it's running security camera software but that's only active at night so it mostly sleeps during the day, no cryptomining, no Seti@Home running.
My current gaming computers - no overlocks to speak off, decent equipment (mostly Ryzen 5000 series, mid-range GPUs for the most part) all run between 400-600W at full tilt, but they rarely run at full tilt (apart from Sense, my UPSes have power displays on them).
It just adds up. PG&E rates just went up 20% last February for ... "reasons". And are slated to do it again next year. And all they do is show how you are spending more money (but not that you are actually using equal or less electricity) and tell you to conserve conserve conserve --- oh, and convert all your appliances and vehicles over to electric while you are at it, because somehow it's better for the environment -- probably because you won't be able to afford to run all that electric equipment.
What a crock of crap. I hate my utility company with a passion. And yes, power draw does make me consider what I will put in my next computer, just because of what I've seen with my Sense unit running lately.
