Folding Forum

just for my own interest, as energy prices skyrocketing in germany:

would somebody dare to estimate a real world pricing/value (in terms of $/€) for PPD units ?

has anybody ever done such calculation ?

i know, calculating PPD and the benefits of this projects are "invaluable" , but if something has a real price, it's sometimes better to argue....

why i'm asking this is, we need heating for the winter for a small room of a charitable project - and having some hardware turn electricity into PPD and waste heat is always better then directly converting electricity with fan or infrared heater into heat.

roland

Where I live, about 16 cents per million points, assuming you're running top-tier efficient folding cards.

thanks. how did you get to that value ?

Plenty of ways to figure out just about anything you want. The easy way is probably to head over to https://folding.lar.systems/ and do some digging on your average GPU efficiency and power use. Then find out your local electricity pricing and do the math, without forgetting to add the overhead of the rest of the computer driving the GPU. Some quick searches will get you close. Or you can measure power at the wall, which skips all the technical crap and gives you a number. There are some fairly cheap meters you can buy, and some save various data as well. I can't find it at the moment but a forum member here commented on a specific bluetooth model that worked well and was less than $20 IIRC.

If you power limit or modify your GPU or any other part of the system, remember that the LAR website stuff factors averages, not exacts. Since many GPU's run great and more efficiently when power limited, you can often get near full points return to science while using less power at the wall. In short, you have to test to limit power use, find the window of efficiency, and if needed only fold to the extent your wallet can tolerate it.

thanks!

CaptainHalon wrote: ↑Tue Sep 20, 2022 8:00 pm Where I live, about 16 cents per million points, assuming you're running top-tier efficient folding cards.

What is your cost per kWh? Here it is .06 peak time and .04 off peak IIRC.

I believe my 5 folders with their CPU/GPUs consume roughly 500W each (measured on one of their UPSes I looked at a few months back). At the moment seem to be averaging about 32M points. So, 2500Wx24 hours… 60kWh a day… if I just pretend that is 12-hours during peak ($1.80/day) and rest off peak ($1.20/day)… $3 a day for 32M PPD or $0.09375 per 1M PPD.

Least I think that is about right. For your $0.16/1M … I assume your energy price is between $0.08-0.09?

I wish we only paid 6 cents per kWh. We pay more than double that where I live!

Even with upper edge GPUs, if we look at it only in power use per million points, or any form of cost/points, the highest numbers would be obtained by running those cards are lower clocks and power limits, finding the sweet spot of PPD/watt. But doing that somewhat defeats the point of buying the higher end GPUs for many, as they want to generate points quickly.

Once you factor in more than one thing, it gets even worse. Like how long will it take you running those GPU's or systems at 100% to recover the additional initial cost to buy the items, vs paying as you go in exchange for accepting less points and lesser efficiencies regardless of points.

>I wish we only paid 6 cents per kWh. We pay more than double that where I live!

hahaha, you're joking. energy prices skyrocketing in germany for the last months. if you live in cologne for example and need to do a new contract with some local energy supplier, you pay more then 60ct/kwh. this is no joke

Town I live in created an aggregation power purchasing office a few years ago. Current contract is giving residents a rate of 9.8 cents per kWh for the electricity supplied. The regional utility charges another 9 cents per kWh to deliver it to homes, or a total of about 19 cents per kWh. A new contract starts with the new year on Jan 1st, will have to see what rates are like then.