I can only think your total consumption must have been pretty modest for that one change to have reduced your bill by 50%. That effectively means that all of your electrical devices combined used less than your i9.
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M1 Mac Mini has dropped my electricity bill by almost 50%
- Thread starter Fravin
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Previous setup (Threadripper + GPU) was consuming 252kWh's of electricity or 350 watts of continuous usage. $30.24
Current setup (M1) consumes 29kWh's of electricity or 40 watts of continuous usage. $3.48
Setup includes ASUS router, modem, monitor and UPS unit that has some inefficiencies.
This is for 30 day runtime at 0.12 cents per kWh.
Besides gaming both are running the same tasks as before. The biggest issue is the GPU as the 1950X would idle at around 90 watts and worst case 170 watts max. When everything is idling it's closer to 200 watts. You place any load on it however and it quickly jumps to 350 watts average with peaks in the 500 watt range.
I leave my previous setup off now unless I need the capacity.
Current setup (M1) consumes 29kWh's of electricity or 40 watts of continuous usage. $3.48
Setup includes ASUS router, modem, monitor and UPS unit that has some inefficiencies.
This is for 30 day runtime at 0.12 cents per kWh.
Besides gaming both are running the same tasks as before. The biggest issue is the GPU as the 1950X would idle at around 90 watts and worst case 170 watts max. When everything is idling it's closer to 200 watts. You place any load on it however and it quickly jumps to 350 watts average with peaks in the 500 watt range.
I leave my previous setup off now unless I need the capacity.
Sorry, this thread sounds super click-baity. You didn’t even tell us what “half” means - half the dollar amount? Half the KwH usage? Was your old desktop running full-throttle 24/7? Where do you live? What are your heating/cooling habits? Did your electric company estimate your last bill or do an actual reading?
You could also buy a kill-o-watt and measure the usage for a month.
In other words, no, your computer upgrade did not drop your electric bill in half
So you're saying you didn't read the thread where most of this was answered? Then you came to a conclusion? Got it.Sorry, this thread sounds super click-baity. You didn’t even tell us what “half” means - half the dollar amount? Half the KwH usage? Was your old desktop running full-throttle 24/7? Where do you live? What are your heating/cooling habits? Did your electric company estimate your last bill or do an actual reading?
You could also buy a kill-o-watt and measure the usage for a month.
In other words, no, your computer upgrade did not drop your electric bill in half
Sorry, hard not to take your post seriously then.
I'm thinking the same thing, it's a matter of scale. As a poster above said, no HVAC, fridge, led lights, gas/solar hot water heater, with the minimal use of electricity with the computer being the main one, I can see it.
In my house it wouldn't make a difference.
When I used to live in the high desert (Apple Valley/Victorville) - I didn't have AC or heat. We lived in a very run down house (rented) with a swamp cooler and a low end refrigerator (but efficient).
My electric bill in the summer was $36. A good chunk of that was my computer. The winter time, I could drop to $20 depending on what we did and how many washer loads we did. Those were tougher times. lol. Swamp coolers are horrible in humid thunderstorms (which high desert didn't have too many).
Now? I live in a 3 story complex where rent is 3x what I was paying in the desert, and yeah, I have a hard time getting the electric bill under $100. lol. Fans run everywhere (wash room, bathrooms), lights everywhere (most CFL/LED), AC is probably the biggest chunk - we average $140-$200 in the summer and maybe $90 in the winter depending on how much the mother in law runs her heaters.
Some of the people I know have $600+ electric bills (they've shown me).
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My electric bill during the summer 500+, would never notice the difference of a computer desktop vs M1. But I could see where if some people have very minimal electric bills a computer could make a difference. For me it would be a drop of water in the ocean.
I think that the climate is a game changer. Here we don't need to keep the house warm in winter, which I suppose is a more demanding task than cool it. I'm not an engineer just thinking about it.
Down here, we have high humidity which helps the A/C to work efficiently. My A/Cs, for instance, uses the water produced in the cooling process to cool down the compressor. Something that could not be done in areas where the temperatures goes down to freezing.
I know that your houses in USA have wood walls. This wouldn't work here. It's too hot. We use concrete which I suppose is more suitable in hot areas. I'm wondering how a concrete made house would handle the low temperatures that you have there. Maybe with a powerful heating device in pipes in the wall. Well, I don't know.
Maybe the fact that we live in apartment buildings with 15+ storeys may impact the way we use electricity to raise or low the internal temperatures.
It is the best strategy to be honest, I do the same with my i7 8700k and RTX 3080.
I remember in Peru - most of the places I was at didn't even have AC, you just sweated it out in the summer. I will never forget the higher voltage resulting in showers of sparks (every prong was melted a little) whenever we went to plug things in. The heating elements on the shower heads for hot water were exciting as well, lol. I know that in those situations, a gaming computer would easily be the biggest draw by far.
Yeah most of the buildings I saw in Peru were heavy old cement - some of them had the aluminum sheet metal for roofing (the one I was in did). It got cold at night and it was hot at the top floor in the evening. I didn't live in Peru permanently but I got to spend a handful of months there over the course of several years.
Seems to me that several posters here can't comprehend life outside of their high electric bills in the USA.
Anyway, I better show myself the door before I get in trouble. Have a great day and enjoy that M1. We sure enjoy ours.
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Well, I tried to explain. But I will do the math for you as it looks the point here.
Let's take R$0,70 as a base value charged by kwh.
Jun 21 260 kwh * R$0,70 = R$182
May 21 260 kwh * R$0,70 = R$182
Apr 21 280 kwh * R$0,70 = R$196
Mar 21 370 kwh * R$0,70 = R$259
Feb 21 530 kwh * R$0,70 = R$371
Jan 21 520 kwh * R$0,70 = R$364
So considering Jan+Feb (running PC) as a base against May+Jun (running M1) we will have R$735 and R$364 respectively. Are you following @Lemon Olive ?
So the amount saved in these two last months against Jan+Feb was R$371.
If we consider June against December we will have R$364 - R$182 = R$182.
Be aware that the value per kwh was arbitrarily and U$1 = R$5
Are you happy now?
Proves nothing. Doesn't prove the M1 Mac had a great deal to do with it, especially that much savings amount. $371 in 60 days? You've also ignored the posts that have mentioned that your energy company may have simply lowered your area's energy cost.
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Pretty much this. The rates used by Fravin are constant. The variable here is the energy consumption, independent of rates.
No doubt the M1 has an impact on the power consumption of the AC, but that's ok. The old PC would still be the cause for higher power requirements.
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Are YOU following? Your own math isn't even consistent.
If R$735 is the usage for January and February, then average per month usage was R$367 or $73 USD.
But then your next example is May + June, which I don't know how that's possible considering 1) June isn't over yet, and 2) you wouldn't know you June billable usage until sometime in July.
But let's pretend you're talking about the bill you are paying in June, which is May's usage, so really April + May was $R364, coming out to $R182 per month...or $36 USD.
For one thing, that is an absurdly low electric bill even before the 50% drop, by US standards. And from what I know of Brazil, it is far more expensive than in the U.S. So, something isn't right here.
Though I would certainly believe a $36 drop in power from ditching a beefy PC.
The price doesn't make a difference. Just look at the consumption. On the January bill it was 520kWh. On the June bill, it was 260... exactly 50% usage as compared to the January bill. The exact dates of when this power was actually used are irrelevant.
Why would the OP have a reason to make these numbers up? There is no doubt that an M1 Mini uses a tiny fraction of the power of a gaming PC, and as such, switching from a gaming PC to a Mini would also dramatically reduce cooling load in a small space.
Using the 2019 Mac Pro as a baseline of a large PC, it can output somewhere between 345-1030 BTU/hour at idle and 1467-3076 BTU/hour at max load, depending on configuration. Older Mac Pros were much less efficient at idle, starting at nearly 500BTU/h at idle but capped at somewhere around 1100BTU/h max. Either way, a desktop gaming style PC could potentially output 10-20x the cooling load of an M1 Mac mini which idles at 23.2 BTU/h and caps at 133BTU/h. If AC cooling capacity was already working near its limit, efficiency will go way down there if it has to try to cool the additional heat from the PC. Environmental power demand is certainly something that should be considered in evaluating the operating costs of a computer.
Lower electricity price tier due to more favorable weather so less demand. In Brazil, June, July and August are the coolest months of the year.
Ok, but in what world does an energy company reduce rates 50%?Lower electricity price tier due to more favorable weather so less demand. In Brazil, June, July and August are the coolest months of the year.
For Socal Edison here in California.
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Red tier in Brazil is ~9x more at 6.24 BRL vs 0.697 BRL.
https://www.bnamericas.com/en/news/brazil-power-regulator-changes-tariff-flag-to-red
Lower electricity price tier due to more favorable weather so less demand. In Brazil, June, July and August are the coolest months of the year.
Right now we are being charged the highest rate in years. That's not because demand, but because we are fighting a water crisis and the power plants are having troubles supplying the electricity needed. The solution: charge more!
Brazil is a mess.
What you had was a gaming rig that can pull 100+ fps on 1080P. Seems like you didn't need the PC at all if you can do everything you need with the new Mac Mini.
There is no way he's paying $36 USD a month for his electric bill. No matter what computers he has or does not have. There are bizarre issues with his data and claims from the start.
There's no way you can prove that he isn't. I lived on $36-$40/mo summer electric bills for years in the high desert here in California (2016-2019). There are no problems any reasonable person would have with what I've seen - several other respectable posters agreed.
Just because you can't comprehend something doesn't mean it doesn't happen or exist.