I’ve been trying to use up more of the loose change I have on things like bus fare. Pawing through the pile of it is annoying though, so I figured I may as well sort some of it.
Maybe I should have gotten bigger containers, though. The mixed bowl you see there is still only a tiny fraction of the entire collection…
I used to leave my gaming box running 24/7, partly out of laziness and partly because I would occasionally log into it during the day to kick off some kind of maintenance, or start downloads, or other things that I wanted done before I got home. It was a bit of a waste of power though, so for the last month or so I’ve been leaving it turned off as much as possible.
I got my power bill today, and I am indeed paying less — it was down from $57 to $42, and according to the stats I used 204 kWh this month versus around 260 kWh last month. It was also reflected in a nice little graph that remained fairly steady and then suddenly dropped.
Still, that was only about 21% of my usage and I could probably drop it further. I have a server system as well, and if it draws 200W on average, that’s 144 kWh per month right there. It does have to run 24/7 though, so I’d have to replace it with better parts (as previously discussed) rather than eliminate it, and if doing so saves another $15 per month, then it would pay for itself in a mere…80 months or so. Yeah, I know, I should be doing it anyway just for conservation’s sake. If I think of it like a game, then my min/maxing instincts start kicking in…
It’s only a single anecdote, of course, but just within the last few weeks, the chef’s salads I get from a nearby cafe have already been trimmed back to half the amount of meat and have still gone up in price by nearly a dollar…
