Here in the UK, the price of electricity has risen sharply and will continue to rise. This has prompted me to measure my CCTV system's power consumption and calculate how much it will cost to run over the year ahead. My system has grown over the years, now comprising:-
Of this, 47W (59VA) is the BI PC in my main living room. Hence, over one year, say 2/3 of the 47W makes a useful contribution to my central heating. However, the power consumed by everything else is lost to the external environment. So, the nett power "wasted" is 142W (daytime) and 190W (at night).
- Blue Iris PC - headless HP i5-10500 with T600 GPU, dual NIC, 16GB RAM, 250GB SSD, 8TB purple drive
- Trendnet TPE-T160 POE+ switch
- TP-LinkTL-SG1008D gigabit switch
- SW801 POE switch
- TP-Link TL-SG1008MP gigabit POE+ switch
- 16 cameras (13 Dahua and 3 Hikvision)
- 5 small discrete IR illuminators plus the use of some IR and LEDs within the cameras
Of this, 47W (59VA) is the BI PC in my main living room. Hence, over one year, say 2/3 of the 47W makes a useful contribution to my central heating. However, the power consumed by everything else is lost to the external environment. So, the nett power "wasted" is 142W (daytime) and 190W (at night).
- Using a simple 50/50 day/night split over one year, this is an average wasted power consumption of 166W.
- The energy consumed over one year is therefore 166W x 8760hrs / 1000 kWh = 1,454kWh
- In the UK, the current price of electricity is 49p per kWh, discounted by the UK Government's "Energy Price Guarantee" to 34p per kWh for domestic consumers until end March 2023.
- The cost of running my CCTV system over the next year will therefore be £600 (US$700), significantly more than I had realised.
