Wattages

[buckry]

Just put my killawatt device on my pumps and found that each one is using 100w. I thought it was going to be a lot more than that. It's like having another small computer or a flood light on the driveway. I'm definitely going to replace one of my 900gph pumps with somthing slightly bigger just to make the waterfall look more consistently awesome. It looks great for 48 hours after cleaning my filter pads, then it loses steam and looks wimpy. Doubling one of my pumps will put me at 400w, which is still a totally reasonable number, then I'l lhave a nice 900gph pump to use in case of failure, or maybe I'll put this on the UV clarifier I just bought since I probably won't be running it all the time anyway, then I can take the pump and UV out of the pond and store it safely somewhere when it's not in use.

Anyone else know the total wattages of their ponds?

 

[Mucky_Waters]

314 watts, running two pumps, pumping aprox 4,400 gph, 9 cent per kWh = 67 cent a day, or about $20 a month

 

[Mucky_Waters]

It's like having another small computer or a flood light on the driveway.

BTW why would you have a small computer on your driveway???

 

[buckry]

lol, well knowing me I'd find a reason. I'm at an all time low of computers in my house but I have 2 really monster ones running and since we cancelled our cable we added a third PC to the TV so we can watch netflix and other such stuff. I've gotten my wife to switch over to a laptop which uses like 60w to charge itself. Let's see a PC on the driveway, ok that's easy, use it to look up BBQ recipes for grilling. Yeah, I can totally see me doing that.

 

[sissy]

I saved a lot on my puters by going with the flat monitors those big old ones burn lots of energy .I also went to all LED tv's and bulbs .The smart pond pump I got from lowes uses the least amount and burns no more than a 50 watt bulb .I think my aerator is the biggest hog on electricity even though it is not supposed too .My bill for electric is usually about a 100 dollars a month on an all electric house .Seems the more energy you save the more the utilities raise there rates to off set higher cost for them and what they call here a loss of revenue ,which to me means we are not using enough electricity .So it is a no win situation .

 

[buckry]

Yeah our bill has been around $100 for electric only since we moved in. No matter what we do to skimp and save it stays right there. We haven't had a CRT in our house in years, I took the last one we had to work as a donation about 3 years ago. We also are 100% compact flourescents which didn't change our bill a single bit.

 

[ididntdoit99]

I do the same thing! lol, my laptop is outside with me all the time working in the garage, working on cars or my motorcycle, building stuff in the backyard.

I also seem to keep gaining computers around my house and I dont know why, we have the two laptops, and then of course I had to hook a desktop up to the tv with a 2tb external to start holding movies on. When I reached over 1000 dvds and was taking up and entire 4x10 feet of wall space with dvds i decided it was time to make my life easier by putting them all on an external hard drive. Then I had to hook up another one in the bar in my basement to hold just music, but that one is never on, i dont spend much time down in the bar anymore with the kids around.

 

[buckry]

I had a media server for a long time but then ended up getting a NAS. It's 2 2TB's cloned and uses way less power than a whole computer. I ended up filling it up in about a year with stuff for me, my wife, and my kids, so I bought a second one and that one is just mine. Both of them are just over half full at this point, but we've slowed way way down with the stuff we are adding. They're really salty, but it's nice to only have 4 hard drives spinning instead of a 400w power supply, a bunch of fans, a GPU, possibly a monitor, and those same 4 drives. Definitely less electricity overall.

 

[sissy]

no matter what it still comes down to the power company .I did look into a dyocore wind sun turbine they featured on diy net work as you don't have all those batteries to tend to .It just switches back and forth between on grid and off grid by itself according to demand .I have a friend in West Virginia who put one in last year and so far he reports it has been good for him .He thinks if he added another it would be the best .It has been almost 8 months since he got it .He has Appalachian power so his rates are higher than mine ,but e-mailed me his bills when he gets them compared to last year .He was spending almost 250 to heat and cool his log house and now he is down to around a 150 dollars a month .He has a house that is made of sips panels but looks like a log home .His bills should have been cheaper than mine .

 

[ididntdoit99]

Good god man, you filled that in a year?... I'm calculating I can fit about 2600 movies on my external if i get them condensed to about 800 mb a piece... it going to take me quite a while to fill this thing.

 

[ididntdoit99]

Not to mention about $12,000 dollars in dvd buying... lol

It kind of stings a little to believe that I have spent that much on dvds.... and thats figuring I bought 500 new movies at $20 a piece and 500 older $5 bin movies.

I actually buy all of my dvds and then make digital copies, so I have all these dvds, its just way easier to look through the list on my computer and pick one out to watch than it is to try to find one in a room full of movies. I know there are simpler, cheaper ways to get movies for free, but i like buying dvds.... and there really isnt anything cooler than walking into a room FULL of dvds like you own your own rental store.

 

[sissy]

dvd junkie :razz: good gosh there are all kinds of addictions out there .Maybe you need dvd intervention .How bout opening a dvd intervention spa to go too .Could maybe be a money maker

 

[ididntdoit99]

No cable, no going out to bars every night.... so we watch movies

 

[buckry]

Well, a good compressed movie is about 800mb, but I haven't really ripped too many myself, I just replaced all of my DVD's with Pirate Bay and sometimes a movie is 2.5gb. I've not worried about it too much. I've also downloaded a bunch of old movies that I didn't already own on DVD. I don't feel like that's stealing because if Tom Hanks hasn't gotten all of his money out of "Volunteers" by now, then it's probably not going to happen.

I've also downloaded tons of TV series, most I owned on DVD as well, but those can easily hit triple digits. In fact, I have the entire run of CHiPS, The A-Team, MacGuyver, and M*A*S*H, each of those is 100GB or more. Then I have all the hot new shows, Modern Faimily, Big Bang Theory, Psyche, etc. On and on, each MB adds up, and adds up fast. My wife has all of True Blood, Glee, and Community, and a bunch of old musicals.

But yeah, we spent about a year digitizing our collection, now that we're done we haven't added anything new in months. I don't go out and download every new movie that comes out. In fact that last thing I acquired was "John Carter" and I bought that from amazon.com for $9.99. Was really good too, aside from the fact that it's in some weird format and I need to get it better copy from Pirate Bay it was a very well spent $10.

 

[buckry]

Bought a pump double the size of my existing ones. Going to replace the one in the farthest part of the pond with this. That should beef the waterfall up and only add 100w more to my power usage. Going to use the old 900gph pump on my UV filter only as needed. Probably won't put this into the waterfall at all, everyone seems really keen on the basket pillow filter in the waterfall so I'm just going to skip a step and put the output from the UV filter straight into a basket with filter media, in fact, I think I'm going to make a mini skippy filter for that out of a 5g bucket. Oh yes, I love that idea. I wish I could find 5g buckets for sale around here that come with lids, that drives me crazy, but I think I have an old kitty litter bucket with matching lid I can use. Oh wait, I already built one of these out of a dog food container, it's still got the filter media in it and everything. Just need to slide the hose in and point it at the pond. Don't you love it when a plan comes together?