[ale] Electric bill

[Byron Jeff]

Georgia Power switches to Summer Pricing in May. They simply charge more
for the same electricity. You can find the rate schedule for standard
residential home service here:

http://www.georgiapower.com/pricing/residential/pricing/standard-service-plan.asp

There were a couple of years we did the Time of Use rate plan (called
Nights and Weekends now) where Georgia power exchanges a low off peak rate
(4.2 cents/KwH) for a very high on peak rate (19.9 cents/Kwh) where on peak
runs from June to September on weekdays from 2PM to 7PM. 

But it's inconvenient. I wouldn't bother trying to switch up machines as
they are not the cause of the rate increase.

BAJ

On Sat, Jun 04, 2011 at 12:30:32PM -0400, David Hillman wrote:
> Our electric bill went up by $15 last month.  Either Georgia Power is passing on some extra fees or we have to look at how we can use electricity more efficiently.  Right now we have 3 laptops and 4 desktops that are plugged in mostly all the time.  One of the laptops (Macbook Pro) is usually plugged into a 21" NEC monitor pretty much all the time.  One of the desktops is a dual 604 pin Xeon server with 4 hard drives--that's our VM server.  The other desktop is a P4 Prescott machine that acts as a security gateway appliance--it's running Untangle 8.  The last desktop is a Core 2 Duo 2.66 Ghz machine for general use and media serving.  Is that too much.?  I was contemplating adding an old HP 4U server to the mix, but I thought better of it.   My latest trip to Fry's had me thinking about replacing all of the servers with some of those Mini-ITX boards.  However, some of the boards feel pretty cheap and the others have way more stuff than I need.  Supermicro has a couple of dual Atom Mini-ITX server boards, but they are pretty expensive.  You get what you pay for with those boards, though.
> 
> I was thinking it would be a good idea for someone to make a Mini-ITX server board with reconfigurable pin headers (future expansion), a couple of USB ports, and maybe 5 or so PCI-E x1 slots.  The PCI-E slots can later be filled with a couple of LAN cards and a RAID card.  Some of the boards should have silent Atom chips and the others should have 775 sockets.  There are a lot Core 2 Duo chips that could be reused for light server use.  We have about 5 Dell machines in our office with dead motherboards, but perfectly functioning C2D chips.  Even better, make them compatible with CoreBoot (LinuxBIOS).
> 
> What do y'all think?

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-- 
Byron A. Jeff
Department Chair: IT/CS/CNET
College of Information and Mathematical Sciences
Clayton State University
http://cims.clayton.edu/bjeff