Whether you are mining Gridcoin, ZCash, Monero or any other altcoin using a regular PC, mining can be costly and using vast amounts of electricity.
There are multiple guides on how to conserve system power, for example by undervolting system components or upgrading the power-supply to be more efficient. All these activities can indeed save you substantial amount of energy but there is another area which is often overlooked because the savings are considered to be very small.
Based on my personal experience and information collected across the internet, I have created an overview relating to hardware connected to your computer that is not in use while mining.
Most of it is common sense and can be implemented with little or no technical expertise. Furthermore it doesn’t require any investments either which is a nice bonus on top.
I have broken down the overview in 2 types of devices:
- External: Peripheral that is connected to a computer via a USB port or other connector. Obviously, they are very easy to connect and disconnect.
- Internal: Hardware that is fixed in the computer and connected via a cables to the motherboard. To disconnect them you need to first power-down your system, opening it up, disconnect both the data cable and power cable and closing the system again. This of course takes a bit more effort.
In the table below you will find the devices, their power consumption and saving you can achieve annually by disconnecting them. To put these savings in perspective, I have also included a column how long you could leave your computer running for “free” after disconnecting the devices for a year. This is based on an average computer consuming 250W per hour, knowing that a laptop will use less while a GPU rig will use much more.
What I found interesting is that even the smallest things, like disconnecting a keyboard, could save me 2.2kW annually (or €0.60 in electricity cost were I live).
I hope you will find the overview below beneficial and can implement some of the suggestions.
Thanks for reading and follow me for more BOINC & Gridcoin related articles.