Light bulb test bank - can it extend to energy monitoring de

Thu 11 Jan 2007, 18:22

The light bulb bank is excellent and I will be hotfooting over there soonest.

I'm also wondering if the bank includes any electricity use meterage devices or could be extended to provide such?

I'd like to do an audit of our lekky hit, particularly as we have quite a few computer network servers, firewalls, desktops and communications devices on the go most of the day.

We overwhelmingly use linux and free/open BSD operating systems and not Microscum Winripoff software so most of this stuff is from the museum era of computing but is still eminently useful - 90-200-500mhz range with a couple of laptops of some pokier speeds. But all the same all the always-on stuff is OLD with old fashioned power supplies and often pretty old arrays of disks, and numerous add on cards in expansion slots.

I am wondering where the crossover point is in terms of chucking all this museum stuff into freecycle and/or the recycling centre up at Dean Pit before it actually dies of irreparable faults? And replacing it all with modern low energy kit like the Via baby boards and their little teeny boxes which consume an order of magnitude less wattage than many desktops?

(However, I am deeply cynical about how much old computer kit is actually recycled, i.e. broken up for component salvage or put to re-use, and not dumped by the container load on the beach of some hapless 3rd world community somewhere, now knee deep in toxic constituent metals and brain addled kids)

Or, alternatively still seeking to reduce energy use but avoid purchasing new equipment, pursuing the idea of re-using and re-tasking old broken screen laptops (or some other semi functioning laptop where the core system remains sound) for server and firewall duties as these do consume much less electricity - if I can find any that can be bodged with enough ram and external disks to do the job? (And if anyone has any old part broken laptops they don't need anymore with some decent internals to them let me have them to see what I can do to make a less energy intensive system that could be also done by others!).

Where is the crossover point between embedded energy of production and continuing consumption on something like an 18/7 basis (usually they do go off at night, preferably on a timeclock, and wake up again).

Knowing the actual energy consumption of the equipment bank as opposed to working it out theoretically would be useful. I can rig the whole lot up to work off a single supply point which would help measurement I suppose?

Further, thinking aloud and extending the idea of re-use rather than re-cycling, utilising linux variants like Damn Small Linux (yes, thats what it is really called!!) that will run useable modern application programs on very modest hardware, could we perhaps have a sort of local area "old computer bank" to demonstrate such alternatives so that people can either forego the need to buy new stuff caused through the deluding hype of the windows industry, or to pass on older kit to those with more modest needs and means; and persuade users that they don't have to pay the Bill Gates corporate rip off tax and in addition buy wasteful hardware upgrades to 5 gigahertz dual processor speed and 2 gigabytes of ram just to display the "Windows" logo on the screen background?

Someone wth a room or office with sufficient space for a few old demo boxes showing people what can be done with say 300mhz and 128mb of ram on a 4gb disk? Or something like a demo weekend or evening in one of the local venues to demonstrate alternatives?

My kids, for example, are hassling me for their "own" computers, and OK, once I get around to sorting out through the bits box in the loft I've got enough to make up probably a few of at least 500mhz class boxes for them to mess about with. Or alternatively let them run diskless workstations as terminals from a single central computer - linux allows this to be easily done, free gratis, unlike windows.

Must be others in the same "demanding" position but without a loft full of old electronic leftovers from years of upgrades. For whom "we" environmentally conscious tekkies/ex-tekkies could do a sort of local "pootercycle "service for, with a bit of handholding thrown in?

Must be someone around with a bit of more public "space" we could do this with? Or a weekend event as I suggested above? I can contribute a couple of old boxes to the cause.

Just a few thoughts.

I was most upset on my last visit to Dean Pit to see computers in the 1ghz class being simply chucked, and that wasn't the only stuff that was being thrown out that someone could have found a use for for years, it simply astonishes me. Sick throwaway society or what?

Remember, we inherit the future from our children!