When you embark on the whole road-to-Damascus-solar-conversion thing you have to take a stock of your current electricity consumption in order to determine the necessary size of your save-the-planet solar power system. This exercise requires a small gadget that plugs into your power points and appliances and laughs itself silly at the resulting HUGE consumption figures. Wonder why we've been delaying this part of the process? Anticipatory embarrassment, that's why. Only now we're up to genuine embarrassment because we've discovered that our 52" plasma TV consumes ONE THIRD of our total electricity.
ONE THIRD. By itself. Not even counting the media centre and the sound system.
No #1 daughter's expression is incidental. She's indicating scale, not humour
This is really embarrassing. Our TV consumes FOUR TIMES MORE POWER than Michael's powerful server uses. TWICE what our fridge and freezer combined use when they're drawing full power from the system on a hot day with their doors open.
What does this mean, apart from the fact that we clearly have a very large TV screen? Well in solar electricity terms it means we need a $40,000 stand-alone system JUST TO POWER THE TV.
What does that mean in financial terms? We'll be selling the TV shortly. And please don't talk to me about things like under-floor heating for the bathrooms OR air-conditioning, because right now these items can't squeeze onto the "if my wish-list had a wish-list..." list. Instead, we're going to be SO green we won't know ourselves, and we'll be replacing said LG plasma screen TV with an LCD screen TV very shortly on the basis that even if we can't sell the plasma TV the LCD screen replacement will pay for itself immediately by NOT costing $40,000...
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2 comments:
Did you not wonder why the electricity bills were so high...? Or did that just get mentally written off as a business cost?! Sometimes it definitely pays to upgrade to the latest technology which is, I guess, what Mike has done with his servers. Anyway we can recommend LCD - and our new 40" from Samsung is just fantastic (do you really need 52"?). Happy shopping!
Well yes, we did wonder about our electricity bill but when you're running 3 businesses from home with a huge server, four computers and three printers that's not surprising. Then you add in the fact that all your water is pumped via an electric pump, the swimming pool cleaning pumps are hugely inefficient and are on 24 hours a day, and your hot water system sent the water out into the garden for 4 months because your agent wouldn't believe there was a leak in the pipes and somehow "oh it was the TV" doesn't occur to you when you get the quarterly bill.
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