60 watts to illuminate just one room used to be the norm. Now it sounds insane. Maybe losing the perfect color rendering index was a worthwhile tradeoff after all.
You can thank MOSFETs for that.
The alternative would be using BJTs (bijunctional transistors) which are far less efficient because whichever mode the transistor is conducting in, there will always be a 0.7 voltage drop from the gate to the emitter (since after all they are diodes). In N-channel MOSFETs there is no voltage drop from gate to source. There’s also no current going into the gate, where as with BJTs there are.
It’s honestly amazing that we got quite some low-energy gear nowadays.
I hope more hardware will get properly power-optimized. There’s no good reason your desktop should suck 600w out of the mains when -20% performance can convert to like -80-90% power draw, like it is in the laptops.
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They still consume 60 watts but they used to too
Multiple 60w bulbs!
Chandeliers with 10 40w bulbs. Recessed lights - 4, 6, or 8 75w bulbs. It’s crazy!
500w or 1000w street lights too. That’s one reason we can absolutely have street level charging, if the owner of the lights plays along.
Street lights use sodium-vapor fluorescence rather than incandescence, which was actually more efficient than LEDs until a few years ago (and I believe that low-pressure sodium-vapor still is and only high-pressure sodium-vapor has been surpassed by LED tech).
So there isn’t all that much power freed in replacing existing street lights lamps with LED.
However that tech doesn’t really work well for lower power application such as home use, hence why people used to have 60W incandescent lamps at home or their fluorescent lamp equivalent (which is around 20W) that were replaced by first 10W LEDs and now even lower as LED light bulb tech has improved.
at least where i live, two-button light switches are called “chandelier switches” because they were originally used to control a single chandelier using two live wires and one neutral. having all the bulbs powered would make the room too hot, so they made a single lamp into two circuits.
also, fun fact, dimmer switches used to be a big file hazard because the current they had to dump from big light fixtures meant they would heat up inside the wall which could make the insulation catch fire.
Some places only permit electric utilities to sell electricity based on kwh usage, so it’s tough unless the electric company also owns the street lights. Otherwise you pay an hourly “parking” rate, not one based on electric consumption
Y’all got some efficient machines. Meanwhile my server closet is sucking over 400W when taxed. It is 1 unraid server, 1 home assistant server, 1 Unifi dream machine, 2 switches (1POE).
I guess it is not that bad overall. But how the fuck did we have houses using a bunch of 100W bulbs years ago but now we use less but pay way more.
oh “taxed” as in under load. i thought you were paying VAT on your watts. WAT.
Optiplex, custom Ubuntu box, custom windows 11 box, UniFi dream machine, 24-port switch, two POE++ APs, two NAS with 10 drives total
And i though mine was sucking to much power.
My own setup uses less than half of that at peak (when my server is running at 100%, which is very rare).
Then again that’s because my server is an N100 Mini-PC that doubles as a TV Media Player and which I chose explicitly for the low TDP of the CPU (just 6W).
It’s actually pretty insane how mainstream PC tech for quite a while just kept going up in power consumption (hence people needing 500W+ power sources) until at some point there was a period when CPU and GPU makers actually made some effort towards better power efficiency, though that period is over and we’re back to graphics cards using so much power you need multiple standard molex power connectors to feed them.
Yeah, my beefy homeserver will be sipping less than 40 watts while encoding 4 simultaneous streams, seeding a few hundred torrents, and tons of other stuff. Kinda nuts.
My UPS has a custom built NAS (low tdp ryzen pro and 4 spinny disks), switch, firewall, 3 mini PCs, raspberry pi) plugged into it that are all under decent load and it reports 80W draw. It’s honestly incredible how far computers have come and how we’re living in an age of apartment sized homeland.
Wow.
And here I thought I was doing so well with about 30w at idle/streaming, and max 80w when converting/ripping.
Granted I’m using an ancient SFF desktop without a dedicated video card, so…
Adding a large hard disk increased idle power 40%.
A built-in GPU (iGPU) is more efficient, no?
Depends on the workload - for light loads like drawing a desktop i am sure this is the case, but under heavy load the increased performance of a normal GPU will probably make up for the higher consumption in a shorter timeframe, compared to the ages it would take running that poor iGPU into the ground for hours (which needs the whole pc to be running that whole time with the respective base power consumption), needing cooling over a long period of time instead of increasing the fan speed for a short duration.
Intel actually went and created a line of low power CPUs to compete with ARM (though their consumption is still twice as much) such as the N100, so you can get quite a bit of CPU power in a modern CPU (so, with hardware video decoding and encoding for all modern codecs).
Also with the transition from HDD to SDD, the power consumption in that side when merelly reading data (which is what’s needed to seed a few hundred torrents) is way lower.
I actually have a Mini-PC with an N100 that’s a TV Media Player, torrent server with an always on VPN (also another nice thing in modern CPUs - the crypto functions implemented in hardware), NAS and home server for a few more things at that tends to run at less than 20% load and uses very little power.
I don’t think the mainstream desktop CPUs, even the notebook ones, are quite as power efficient as those things, and if you add a dedicated graphics card, it’s even worse.
Before the current mempocalypse it was actually cheaper in the mid and long term to just buy a brand new Mini-PC with an N100 (mine was €130) to use as an always ON homesever than use an old desktop, purelly because of the massive power savings.
I’m often flabbergasted at tech YouTubers who complain about the high energy cost of their 20 watt or 14 watt home server.
I’m like, you understand that we used to burn 2.4 kilowatts a day to light a single room, right?
We also used to build houses to ‘breathe’, specifically encouraging air flow through the walls, etc. to carry away the water leaking in through all the unsealed holes, and allowing any efforts in heating and cooling to go out that same way. In the days of yore, the gas lines that fed English streetlamps with coal gas were allowed to just flow, even when not lit. It’s a wild thought to wonder how much longer the end of fossil fuels could have been put off if efficiency had been a priority from the start.
If efficiency is key, burning things is out of question decades earlier.
Because burning is never really efficient
Efficiency is always dependent on the variables chosen as your metrics. Burning can be a very efficient way of getting rid of garbage under certain metrics. Burning wood is very efficient in terms of startup costs for heating up an area. Burning coal gas released because you want to make coal coke is materially efficient in thermal output per tonne of coal. I do have to wonder what the timeline would look like if some of the more efficient designs for vehicle engines had been in use all the way back when Benz was starting up.
Mincing words…
Going from heat to motion might be a relatively simple way but at least with common heat engines its…not efficient… by any metric.
In the winter, it might as well be free since I’m using the heat anyway.
This is actually not entirely true if you have a heat pump.
Heat pumps can be more efficient than electric / resistive heating since they just move latent heat around rather than having to create it from electricity. The heat itself is still not being wasted, but using an electric heater to heat a space will use more power than using a heat pump.
Did somebody mention heat pumps?
Absolutely fantastic. Got a laugh out of me.
I recognize that YouTuber but am ootl … What’s his deal with heat pumps?
He’s covered many topics that involve heat pumps, the refrigeration cycle, or latent heat in some capacity. The joke is that he somehow always ends up explaining the refrigeration cycle.
Fascinating! TIL.
Nobody has a heat pump though
Some places do!
Still, if you don’t, yeah, you can just count it as heating.
Same. I’ve got my server racks in my den on my first-floor, and the heat fairly reliably and evenly rises to warm my second and third floors to comfortable levels.
Sitting in my tiny Chicagoland apartment with my AC blown out, I could reach my arm out in the kitchen and feel the temperature from my single 60W bulb in the corner.
A year or so ago I touched a 60W incandescent and about peeled skin. Forgot how much heat comes from a glowing filament!
Anyone still call your power bill the “light bill”? :)
I recently saw in a series or movie (I think it was Spider Noir) someone grab a naked lightbulb to stop it from swinging without any reaction whatsoever. I was screaming at the TV
If you are old enough, you can remember the EasyBake Oven.
You gotta pump those numbers up, those are rookie numbers.
Just remember to turn it off when you are out of the room.
Mine is like 18 W idle, just the server. I did setup auto taking down some unused containers though
