I'm looking at $200/mo electric bills on average, even though I have
stopped
using many heavy-draw appliances.

You didn't mention your heaviest draw appliance, the water heater. Is
that gas, or are you still taking showers? Convert to natural gas, and
consider a solar water heater.

All heating systems in the house are oil-fired, including the water heater.


Then turn your monitors off, which draw more power than the computers.
If you are actually using $200/month in computer power, the payback on
switching to Centrino technology notebooks would be pretty short. The
Pentium M is pretty energy efficient.

--
http://home.teleport.com/~larryc

The monitors each draw about 1.5A when running (not standby). The PC servers
draw close to 8A each when number-crunching.
Since the computers are relatively new, highly customized and configured
with a lot of proprietary hardware and software, we're looking at a 5-year
amortization on the costs, and it will be a few years before we replace them
with newer technology. I used to think it was solely the Athlon CPUs that
were drawing most of the juice, but between our four PCs, there are 22 hard
drives that are running at all times. We do use laptops too, but only for
limited use, mostly portable non-realtime applications--their hard disc
systems are far too slow. The servers are using RAID discs for sustained
very high throughput.

We're pretty much stuck with the loads, so we are looking at finding cheaper
ways to power them.


--
Take care,

Mark & Mary Ann Weiss

VIDEO PRODUCTION . FILM SCANNING . AUDIO RESTORATION
Hear my Kurzweil Creations at: http://www.dv-clips.com/theater.htm
Business sites at:
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www.mwcomms.com
www.adventuresinanimemusic.com
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