Yes. That’s a roof of consumption to the poorest ones. They pay a little fee to have 80kwh per month.
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M1 Mac Mini has dropped my electricity bill by almost 50%
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OP created a thread with a sensationalized heading about saving 50% on their electric bill, and then does not say how much they saved. 3 pages and several responses deep, and still has not said a word about the amount of savings. Frankly, that is bizarre.
Well, you didn’t asked before...
But, honestly, I don’t think it would be possible for you to understand how electric power is charged down here. In fact, neither do we understand it. We just pay.
In Brazil we have 3 fees. The yellow, the orange and the red one. There are times that the government says that the offer is bigger than demand and so, it lows the fee to the yellow one. When the demand is too high, the government raises the fee for the orange one. And when there’s too many people using too much electricity they will turn it up again for the red.
But it happens that these fees aren’t monthly applied, but daily as demand goes. So you could have all 3 fees billed in a single month.
Further than that, the tax charged will differ from each fee. Things gets worst because the consumer can’t assess how these fees are applied. It’s a mess.
Being honest, the bill don‘t show how much did I paid last month. It only shows the monthly consumption. Having said that I won’t look for the older bills on my files. No, sir, I won’t do that. I’m sorry.
I can show you the values for each fee in time of closure, which is printed in the bill, but as I said, it’s not possible to know how they were applied. Have a look. Good luck to you.
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Lemon, I didn’t said it was a saving in currency. It’s a hell to understand how it is charged. I said that the consumption has dropped by half.
I‘m sorry to not been able to provide you the information you want or as you want.
I’m really sorry.
No electric vehicle. Use gas for heat, cooking, and hot water; but, have an electric washer and dryer. We have one child. We live in a 4,900 sq ft home and have two in-home offices (one for my wife's photography business, one for my consulting business). My wife stays at home all day as she primarily works from home. Thermostats during the summer are set at 72-73 during the day/night except for master bedroom that is set to 67 during the night.
I just find it odd that I'm using thousands more. I wonder how much I used when I lived in Zambia.
This is our summer time bill - running the AC quite a bit here in California... Can you tell a heat wave hit about a week ago?
Rate Per KWhr
This amounts to about a $140 estimated bill.
4800 kWh/month comes out to 6.6 kW average. Seems like you should consider solar and an hvac upgrade, maybe geothermal.
For those who are bent out of shape about the OP not posting dollar amounts: doing a rough calculation (250 kWh * 0.7 R$/kWh) reveals the ballpark number is around 35 USD / month savings. Not bad.
I don’t have a horse in that race. TBH, the kWh figure is more interesting to me since energy prices vary wildly (remember Texas?). He could have posted that he saved $8000/month and all that would mean is that his local government and utilities are crazy.This was definitely an end of the world scenario. Sensationalism at it's highest factor... the worst form of bait and switch I have EVER seen. CLEARLY the OP was intentionally hiding this. /extreme sarcasm.
Wow, what? I use 6000kWh a year (450-550 per month) And that's with an EV, single family home, four occupants. It was around 5000kWh before I got the EV. I see you're in the US, where exactly?
I'm in California, where price per kWh is high (my average is about 24c per kWh), but that prompts us to try to cut consumption. I'm also near the coast so we're usually 20-30F lower than a few miles inland so we don't (usually) need AC.
No. The assertion is just baseless. Unless you have a bunch of gpus mining cryptocurrency 24/7, your computers are not near 50% of your household power consumption, and removing them without replacement would not drop your electricity bill that much.
Assuming this actually happened (and I'm skeptical), you aren't accounting for something.
I suppose this could be possible if you don't use household outlets for anything (they still consume a little power), don't own a refrigerator, an electric stove, or almost anything other than your computing devices, as that's what it would take. Even then I'm not sure it's a 50% drop in power consumption from intel mini -> M1 mini. Numbers might be around somewhere.
I've been to South America (Peru) - I'm not at all skeptical that a high end gaming computer could easily be a good chunk of someone's electricity for the month. Here in the USA? I posted my own electrical usage. Without AC, I use 8-9kwhr a day. With AC, I can easily hit 30kwhr a day. My computers don't factor into a meaningful % of that. The OP is in South America.
He has already said he was on his PC 12+ hours a day, it was overclocked, and it had an 850W power supply. Someone already calculated that gets close to the OP's power consumption reduction, and it's entirely possible that the reduction in heat generated from the PC would cut his AC requirements to account for the rest.
Please provide your estimates of how much power a PC under the above use-cases would use.
Edit:I see you say "... intel mini -> M1 mini ...". Just checking, are you basing your assumptions on the OP's original PC being an Intel Mini? Because it was "... PC was running Windows with an i9, a RTX2070 and a 850w PSU"
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The computer that I sold was a PC. An i9 9900ks CPU with a RTX2070. Not an Intel Mini.
Honestly I think that all that can be said about it are in the past posts.
But, if you really wants to know, we do have a fridge, a microwave, a laundry machine, an electric iron, 3 led TVs, 2 AC, an iMac (my wife’s), a laser printer and a inkjet one. We have mobiles, iPads, a lot of chargers (for my camera’s battery, some battery operated tools), and one pair of bookshelf’s loudspeakers.
We use gas for cook and for heat water.
Hmm.. I read the OP but I must have glossed over the build stats there. These are two entirely different classes of machines, but this would suggest that his previous computer accounted for >50% of power consumption, presumably significantly more than 50%, due to minor use associated with keeping the lines active and the amount still needed by the M1 mini. Otherwise that wouldn't even be possible. That seems insane to me.
There's no way your old computer was 50% of power consumption with that power load, even if you mined cryptocurrency. The refrigerator alone would at least match it under normal use, assuming it's not a tiny one.
It's easy to miss confounding variables on this stuff. I think you got caught by coincidence more than anything.
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Hey, enjoy that M1 processor. I sure am. I even got one for my mother in law. These things sip power and stay super cool. Love them.
You’re really going out of your way to placate some of these posters. That’s nice of you.
lol
The question isn't "does he reduce his bill by half?" but is rather "does he reduce his monthly consumption by 260kWh?" It's just a minor detail that's nearly half of his original bill. If I did that, it would be nearly half my monthly consumption. If southerndoc did it would be just 5% of his monthly consumption.
So, can switching a power-hungry PC out for a Mac M1 Mini reduce monthly power consumption by 260kWh? And if not, what do you think is a more likely amount?
Edit: I had 220kWh originally, I misremembered the amount he posted.
It's not always easy to find good power statistics, as it requires instrumentation to break out individual stuff. These are probably good enough.
Power-Hungry PC? Here's How Much Electricity Your Computer Consumes
How much does it cost to run your PC? It's not a one-size-fits-all answer, but here's how to measure how much electricity your home computer eats up.
The first guy came up with the following numbers. I don't know their reliability.
Second one here. I'll quote part of it. I imagine his use would be higher for a gaming computer, but your suggestion is not feasible.
Everything else would still need to be < 50% of power consumption. Otherwise the percentages would not add up.
You can't take it in isolation unless you actually isolate it and account for baseline power consumption (nothing hooked up to any outlet and nothing hardwired in use at any time).
Depending on AC usage and room size, maybe even more. I can get away without AC using low power electronic devices, even in the summer approaching 100F. I just keep the windows shut and roller shutter down during the day and open everything up at night. Running a PC, there’s no way doing that. The PC is heating up the room so much, I have to use AC.
Again, depending on AC make and model, this can save a ton of electricity. Check manufacturers specs.
I used to have a Power Mac G5, and when I ran it on hot days, the small AC unit in the room was unable to adequately cool the space and would run almost constantly. Even only using the G5 a little bit during the summer caused a noticeable increase in my power bills, although not to this extent. I am not at all surprised that significant savings can be had when comparing the Mac Mini and a desktop PC when both were used for significant lengths of time in hot weather.
I can’t figure out why this thread is so controversial.
I can’t figure out why this thread is so controversial.
Great story of the cost savings of running M1.
Somewhere Tim Cook sits laughing at those that mocked his commitment to carbon neutrality.
Somewhere Tim Cook sits laughing at those that mocked his commitment to carbon neutrality.
A base Mac Mini M1 8GB/256GB costs 8699.00 Brazilian Reals (BRL) or $1707 USD.
https://www.apple.com/br/shop/buy-mac/mac-mini
Cost of electricity in Brazil is 0.697 Real per kWh.
https://www.globalpetrolprices.com/Brazil/electricity_prices/
8699.00 BRL gets you 12481 kWh of electricity.
If your usage didn't change between PC and Mac Mini M1 then your PC was mostly idle with a consumption of about 83W.
For the cost of a new Mac Mini M1 you could run your PC for 15037 hours or 627 days and you're not giving up versatility.
Instead, you can disable boost clocks or underclock your PC CPU and GPU to further lower power consumption and buy a Raspberry Pi 4 8GB to supplement for light desktop duties.
Why would anyone want that messy setup? PC + GPU + Raspberry Pi instead of just M1? Get the M1, and if you want to game, get also an Xbox X.
You know, I am a simple guy at heart.
When people say they saved money somehow, for whatever reason, whether a product is on sale … they put numbers down ( original price - discount = price paid ). When you say you cut your electric bill in half based on months of electric bills, provide the numbers. You never mention the savings, you don’t mention the details that started this whole post.
So, yes, people are going to question what is what, argue, … do some quick math and say the story does not hold water unless this that or another.
And, I can guarantee you that I could replace every computer in my family with an m1, and it wouldn’t even get noticed.