First be warned: this is a technical post. A few weeks ago I was thinking about building a lower power mini-computer to replace my current barebone most of the time – except when 3d is needed. I was aiming at 50 watts maximum power usage. I looked around at myelectronics.nl, but I couldn’t find what I was looking for (either too expensive or even not small enough or missing functionality). My conclusion was then quite simple: why not use my Asus EEE netbook? Maximum power usage is ~22 watts on it. It has SSD (8 GB) and is practically silent, it only makes some little noise when the mini-fan thinks it gets to hot inside the netbook. For the rest it has all that I want/need (WiFi, USB, VGA-out, audio in/out etc). I wanted to combine this device with my barebone, so I had to get a KVM-switch. I bought the Aten KVM Switch CS-62DU, for those who are interested. Works fine, although I use it only for switching the keyboard/mouse. The Asus is analog connected to my TFT-monitor and my barebone is digitally connected to my TFT-monitor. Works great and my TFT+netbook use together at most ~71 watts.

Further, because I am now switching between my barebone and my netbook I needed a central storage facility to access my data more easily. There goes my low power moral. I looked around and it seemed that the Conceptronic – seems to be a Tulip-division? – CH3SNAS is a good device for this, average power usage is ~14 watts and when under heavy load it uses ~27 watts. There are also a lot of hacks for this device, because it is based on Linux it’s quite easy to customize it. The amount of storage is a little bit outrageous with 1 TB (or 2×500 GB in RAID0/1), but so be it.

One final thing to mention is that we’ve also put a time-clock between the router and the modem. Partially to save also energy there, but also another reason: we have to reboot the router almost every day, because it freezes. So that’s now combined with a nightly shutdown and power saving.

Conclusion in the end: total power usage in the worst case is ~99 watts and in the best case it’s ~ 70 watts. It seems to become an obsession, but I like to play/experiment this way.