POWER STRUGGLE

What can we do to make our PCs kinder on our ENERGY BILLS?

- Phil Iwaniuk

As it turns out, we’ve been burning quite a lot of gas to make electricity. About 29% of our gas is used for generating it here in the UK. Also, 3% of all the gas we consume here comes from Russia, and since Russia invaded Ukraine that supply line’s been compromised. That happened during a period of soaring wholesale costs for energy sources created by sudden post-pandemic demand, and as a result it now costs about £10,000 to boil a kettle.

We just have to laugh, otherwise we’d cry. The cost of living crisis is real, and let’s not be so flippant as to suggest that running a gaming PC is among the chief concerns it creates, but let’s also keep in mind that PC gamers are a broad group with varied financial backgrounds. In fact the only thing we all have in common in that regard is that we’d prefer to pay less for our expanding energy bills.

WATTS UP

These events have prompted many of us to seriously consider how much energy our gaming devices actually consume, perhaps for the first time. Before bills started skyrocketing in early 2022 onwards, you could use an average energy unit cost of 12.5 p/kWh to ballpark estimate your gaming PC’s usage. Most PCs use 100-200W depending on their specs, so that would have cost you between 10p-20p per day.

Now the average energy unit cost is somewhere around 28 p/kWh, so you can go ahead and double that figure now. And then tack on another 40% if electric bills increase by as much as the news media is telling us they could this winter.