Comment by gambiting | Hacker News Reader

Comment by gambiting | Hacker News Reader

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>> The power draw is around the same as a fairly typical lightbulb from 20 years ago, so I can totally live with that.

Since you mentioned pounds, I just want to address the power consumption part.

At averaged 100W power usage, the system will use 2.4kWh of electricity every day. In UK the energy prices are absolutely exploding - with the government estimating that the "average" consumer will be paying 28p/kWh of electricity from April. At that price, you are talking £20 a month in JUST ELECTRICITY to keep the system running. That's more than some basic broadband offers in this country on a per month basis.

Yes I know that's not an option for you. But damn, £20 worth of electricity a month just to keep my internet router running? That's crazy.

Yeah, I get that it's not insignificant but it's not just a router, it's also uploading my packets to a fast moving object around 340 miles away. I'd like for it to be less but I'd also like for Openreach to put a green cabinet near my house and give me VDSL.

To put it in context, my PC isn't on 24 hrs a day but it's almost certainly drawing at least 250W for the 9 or 10 hours it is on. It's just a cost of working from home.

> almost certainly drawing at least 250W

You should throw a meter on it and actually check. My recent-ish Ryzen 2600 desktop, 1070 GPU, and 27" monitor use <100W when not doing something like intense gaming. Even then, under intense gaming its often between 300-500W of usage. YMMV, obviously.

If he has older monitors or multiple monitors that can be significant load. My older Dell Ultrasharp 24" monitors are around 80-100 watts each last I measured.

For comparison, my US bill is currently 9.5c/kWh, which is 7p/kWh. Your UK price is 4x that of mine! The SpaceX office where the dish was designed is just down the road from here, so I can totally see the engineers thinking "What's the big deal, it's only 100W? That's a few dollars a month."

> Your UK price is 4x that of mine!

And just to drive the point home: this is not the last price increase we will see. It will rise another 50% in October and probably won't fall much until 2024.

In California we pay an average of 25-35c/kwh.

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