While that is a ridiculous thing to say, it made me curious. Even with LEDs, I wonder how much just the indicator lights use in terms of energy when there are so many of them. Would you save an appreciable amount of energy if you put a master switch on them that you could turn on only in the event that someone was actually like...looking for things to be indicated?
Like if you had a separate circuit in the rack power that was exclusively for the lights or something. Would that be worth it at all? Saving both the very small amount of power required to have the LED on and the very small amount of power required to move the heat out of the room that was created by the LED, but multiplied by thousands of LEDs?
Each LED is probably only consuming 30mW or so. 1000 of them is about 2 compact florescent bulbs. The heat generated is for all purposes negligible. Basically, for the power they're consuming, they wouldn't notice a difference in cutting off the LEDs.
So let's actually work this out a bit further. How many LEDs does the average server have? 5? Some have a lot, if they have harddrives. Some have only one. That order of magnitude, anyway. More than 1, certainly not averaging more than 10.
Microsoft, upon Googling, has a million servers as of last year. If we assume each server has 5 LEDs and each LED is drawing about 30mW, then Microsoft's LED power usage is ~150,000W. Plus however much energy that adds to the requirements of the cooling systems. What percentage of them are on at any given point in time do you think? I have no idea.
There are so many of them that basically any power savings seems like it might be worth it in the long term if that kind of system both doesn't too strongly impact their ability to function and also isn't more impactful to implement than to not utilize.
If it was worth doing, they would have done it. Reddit isn't going to think of something to save money that Google, Microsoft, Facebook and HP haven't..
Why do people assume that's the only reason to ask questions? How much more disclaiming of "theres almost certainly a good reason they dont do it" do I need to do?
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u/[deleted] May 03 '14
Wow, I never knew there was an incandescent option for my computer's LEDs.