...but instead of a dryer, it's a z890! Totally worth it!

Truuuuue, but my clothes are still wet. Combine the two, though, and it'll dry clothes faster than you can put them in.*

*An incredibly lame joke playing off the I/O throughput of mainframes, and...oh, never mind.

In the video he says it's been negligible so far.

Thanks. At work, can't (well, more "out of courtesy to the client that pays me by the hour, won't") watch the video. I'm not terribly familiar with the Z architecture, but I guess if you're not working the thing real hard maybe it doesn't use much power. On the ancient hardware I grew up on, just spinning the drives would probably double your residential power bill.

Now I want to ask my parents if their power bill dropped when I moved out of the house.

I know mine did. I had various machines, including a 233mhz PowerPC tangerine iMac running in a cupboard for a while. They dropped their power bill even lower by switching from a ~150W desktop to a 90W MacBook (which has ridiculously good standby power usage).

It's interesting now, I would have never thought of designing machines (off the shelf bought parts) for low power usage before I moved out.

When I did move out, power was 30 cents per kilowatt-hour and I definitely noticed the difference moving from NVidia to AMD (for a PC that ran 24 hours a day). That PC is now back on NVidia because a single GTX 970 was more efficient than my 2x6870s. I really wish they'd allow me to turn off the dedicated GPU and go back to the Intel iGPU when I'm only running Visual Studio. Lucid Virtu could have done this but it's really buggy.

These days I just make sure Wake On Lan works properly (a challenge in Windows 10 with commodity hardware) and run mostly ARM boxes otherwise.

I don't think I'd even consider running old mainframe equipment in Australia (unless I had 2+KW of solar on the roof)

Wow, I guess electric power really is cheaper in Norway than in Australia. I just did the math, and I paid around 11 Austrialian cents/KWh last two months. And that's including a pretty substantial (for me, on a 2577 kwh bill) fixed price. It's a shame bandwidth is so expensive here, or there would probably have been more big server hosters in Norway.

Of course with electrical heating most of the year, running power hungry hardware 24/7 is arguably more efficient than just straight burning the electricity for heat...

I had problems with WOL on Windows 10 too...my solution was to just update the networkcard drivers to the latest version, get them from the manufacturer.

I concur with "I know mine did" :) On the other hand it is interesting that at the same time their heating bill went up.

And as my (bank's) house has mostly electric heating I somehow still don't care about power consumption of various computers and electronics much.