With our decision not to connect our future home to the electricity grid I have started thinking about ways of making the most of the electricity that we will collect with our solar panels. Unfortunately I currently have a number of computers that that are acting as various servers and are therefore constantly on which is obviously consuming a bit of electrical.
Also I do believe in building in redundancy where ever you can, especially with computers and hard drive storage. Over the years I have had too many hard drives fail to trust a single hard drive with my data. So until recently I had a large computer acting as a file server utilising 4 hard drives in a redundant set-up (RAID 5 for those that are interested). This computer was using 80W on average or 0.35A when switched on.
As this computer has started to fail (video card is no longer working) a few weeks ago, I had to decide what to do about fixing it. There where a number of options that went through my head with the seemingly easiest being to just replace the video card. Due to the age of the computer I haven't been able to find a fitting video card.
While trying to decide how to progress I realised that it was the right time to look at less energy intensive options that still give me all the functionality I wanted. There are a number of network attached external hard drive (also known as NAS) available with most of the cheaper units only providing a single hard drive.
Nevertheless I found a model made by Western Digital (WD) called the "MyBook World Edition II" that was less than \$500 and included two 500GB hard drives that can be set-up in a redundant manner. That by itself almost made my decision but what really pushed me over the line was that the box itself actually runs of 12V supplied by a power pack.
Measuring the energy consumption of my new "MyBook" has confirmed that when plugged into a 240V power socket the power consumption is only one fifth (16W) of the old computer and according to my measurement with the box turned of the power pack consuming 9w or nearly half, I am hoping that the MyBook would consume less than 10W plugged directly into 12V solar system.
Now the change of the computer to this external hard drive is only one step towards saving energy but it's the first opportunity since we have made our decision to build our new home and included an off-grid solar installation. I am sure there will be changes that we will make over the next 2 years to help us save some more electricity and I am happy to keep you all posted on any further changes we are making.
I am also aware that this is probably quite a dry post for most of my normal readers and I promise there won't be to many of these to come, but please do let me know if this post was actually interesting to at least some of you.
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