How is your HTPC setup in regards to powering on/off?

[jptaz]

I disagree with the idea that keeping a computer on 24/7. Since I started to hibernate my electric bill has gone down significatnly.

At idle my SageTV Server draws a continuous 320 watts of power per my UPS(8 Hard drives draw a lot of power). So that works out to be 7.68 KWh a day...so round it up to 8 since it draws more than when recording and playing back video. With my current rates that is at min $26.28 a month and that assumes I do not go over 17KWh a day and at that point the rate goes up.

Now I am hibernating my system everyday at 3AM after my Backups and Defrag Jobs are completed. Then at 4:30 PM my system wakes and reboots to make sure that all my hardware works correctly...helps with IR blaster issues and external USB HD Devices. With this schedule I am only using 3.5KWh a day which costs me $11.50 a month. So I am saving at min $15 a month on electricity. Ok so even if if powering on my system once a day wears out one of my drives big deal...they all have 5 year warranty and it is a RAID 5 setup so it won't even interrupt my ability to use SageTV. I already had one drive fail before I got my cooling issues resolved. I have found that drive failures occur more often because of over heating issues than any other reason. $180 a year saving is worth the potential risk of hardware failure.

John

[doc]

I like the idea of sending my pc to sleep to save my bills but the main problem is I have a friend in New Zealand who placeshifts in to watch all the shows that she can't get over there, so I supposed I'm stuck....

I've become quite tight since trying to get rid of my mortgage, still a long way to go but the small savings all add up.

and I may get made redundant later in the year so I've been reducing the monthly outgoings too.... I just cant quite retire.... only 21 years to go

[blade]

Originally Posted by jptaz

Ok so even if if powering on my system once a day wears out one of my drives big deal...

Once a day isn't bad. I totally agree with conserving power within reason. What I disagree with is putting it to sleep after 30 minutes to an hour when family members are using it throughout the day or Sage is waking to make recordings every few hours. If it's going to sleep too quickly it can easily be waking half dozen times a day or more.

For example I have some shows that come on almost daily at 7-9 a.m., 2-5 p.m., random times during prime time, and others from 12-1 a.m. Those are just the daily recordings, there are many others recorded at random times each day. Then of course the server needs to be up when people are actually watching the recordings. In my case the server would be sleeping and waking every couple of hours.

Personally I don't turn my TV off everytime I go to the bathroom or grab a snack so why would I want my computer powering down after a 5-10 minute snack run.

I just think instead of setting the standby time to an extraordinarly short period of time people should think about it a bit more and select a wise time to spin down. You can still have the system in standby a large part of the day without having it constantly cycling on and off. I'm sure many people here have done that, but I'm sure others have just set a short amount of time and forgot about it.

[blade]

Originally Posted by doc

I like the idea of sending my pc to sleep to save my bills but the main problem is I have a friend in New Zealand who placeshifts in to watch all the shows that she can't get over there, so I supposed I'm stuck....

Can your Sage server wake on lan? I don't know how well that would work, but it might be worth looking into.

[doc]

I've worked in IT admin for 8 years and WOL is one thing I've avoided like the plague. We've discussed it many times for software rollouts but never got round to looking into it.

I'm that bored at work these days that I suppose I could spend a few hours looking into it tomorrow.... I could spend all day if I really wanted to

[doc]

There are some wake on lan utils at www.depicus.com and I think its possible to write a web page (hosted at my work on the dirty internet system) using asp and it should be possible to get it to send a 'magic packet' to my router at home that should then port forward it to my sage box. I say should be able to, I bet in reality its not quite that simple......

[jptaz]

Blade,

I agree that it all depends on usage patterns. We never record anything after 3 AM until prime time(8PM) as a general rule so it is not a big deal for us and my wife likes watching TV at 5:30 PM while she is making dinner and we usually watch TV the rest of the evening or things are recording. Once we have kids it may not be as easy to keep it off for more than half the day, but for now it works.

John