Computers are already an integral part of today’s society. We use them for just about everything, from work to leisure and entertainment, to social media, talking with friends, and just about anything you can imagine. PCs are incredibly powerful and versatile machines, capable of doing amazing tasks that we already consider everyday, but do you know how much this costs you in the form of electricity consumption ? In this article we are going to tell you how you can reliably measure the consumption of your PC.
If you use your PC for basic tasks like word processing and social media, your computer is probably not using too much power. However, more demanding tasks such as video editing or gaming can cause a significant increase in energy consumption, and that ultimately shows in the bills at the end of the month. If you want to know exactly how much your PC consumes, then keep reading because we are going to tell you everything.
Tools that help you get an idea
One of the easiest ways to calculate “more or less” the consumption of your PC is to use one of the many tools that you can find on the net, such as consumption calculators, which are also free in most cases. In these tools you can enter the hardware you have and they will tell you what power your equipment consumes at most , but it is not a reliable value that you can measure to make precise calculations and, therefore, although they can help you to get an idea they will not give the exact consumption.
As we saw previously, these calculators are quite reliable to get an idea, but they are not used to measure the consumption of the PC as such because the calculations are approximate and are based on an expectation of use in which you are using the PC always at maximum its capacity, something that is not realistic unless you use it to mine cryptocurrencies and have it 24 × 7 at 100% of its capacity.
How to reliably measure PC consumption
The only way you have to accurately and reliably measure the consumption of the PC is by using external tools, that is, consumption meters. The cheapest option you have is to buy a wall meter, which plugs into the wall outlet and to this you connect the PC strip, which includes the tower, the monitor and if you have speakers or other peripherals that are plugged in to the current.
Most of these meters are quite accurate, and in addition to measuring the instantaneous consumption at all times, they allow you to configure the cost of the kWh of electricity and calculate the accumulated cost, hours on, etc.
It is also a cheap way to do it because you have quite complete models for quite little money. There are also other models that do not have a screen to show the data, but that nevertheless are associated with an application on your smartphone to show you consumption, graphs and in fact most also allow a domotic control of the plug to be able to turn it off and on at will .
You also have the option of using a clamp multimeter, which will tell you the instantaneous consumption at all times by putting the clamp on the power cable. These advanced tools will give you a lot of electrical data in addition to consumption, such as voltage or current intensity, but generally they will not calculate consumption in monetary terms, and it would also be quite inconvenient to always have them on to be able to do a manual calculation.
In short, if you want to measure the real consumption of your PC and at the same time calculate how much it costs to have it turned on, the best option is to acquire a wall consumption meter, because in addition to being the most reliable and easy to use option it is also the cheapest. However, if you do not want to buy any of this you can always use online tools that, although they are quite reliable, as we have said before only serve to get an idea and not to know the actual consumption of the equipment.