Lowering energy usage of the server

[ricksebak]

My electric bill last month was way higher than I would have liked, and I thought my server and my media center machine might have something to do with that. So I borrowed an energy meter from a friend and found that my server is using 82 watts of electric. I installed the package 'powertop' and it told me which devices were using the most power. I have already set my backup hard drive to spin down when idle, thanks to the guide on this site, so that wasn't a problem. But powertop found that my sound card and video card were eating up a lot of power. This is a headless server so I have no use for either of those. I went into the BIOS and disabled the onboard sound card, and also yanked out the video card, an unused wifi card, and pulled the power out of the cdrom drive since I never use that either. And now I'm down to 62 watts, which is a savings of 25% just by getting rid of stuff I never use anyway.

Does anyone else have stories or tips for saving energy? Any crazy scripts for putting the server to sleep if it's not being used?

[SergeantBort]

Only other thing I could recommend would be upgrading your PSU to one of the 80+ rated ones at least, if not the 80+ gold models (depends if you want to spend the money)

I've never hooked up a meter to my server... even my old set up which wasn't 80+ can't say it would have been using that much energy... running with 80+ PSU now, with my upgrade, and while it might just be coincidence my electric bill was lower last month (might be weather change so heat wasn't running much) but it was a significant change and the weather didn't change that much...