Mostly Harmless

Every time my refrigerator stops making that awful racket (noisy compressor) the apartment is plunged into “quiet.”

In the olden days — last month — I wouldn’t notice that because the equally noisy fans in my Mac would take up the slack. It was an ongoing duel between the compressor and the turbo fans on the accelerator in my Mac. The fans ran full-speed all the time as far as I could tell.

Then one day my father bought a new iMac, which was faster than my Mac, and I couldn’t stand for that. (Also I’d been waiting to get a new Mac for a long time and it seemed like it’d be a while before the next batch of machines came out.)

Now I have a spiffy new Mac Pro with four, count ‘em: four, 2.6 GHz processors. It’s a good thing I bought a new monitor too because those 4 CPU meters take up lots of space. (Not that I really need the meters running because nothing seems to tax the CPUs much at all. They’re flat-lined most of the time. It’s nice to have some extra oomph. I do encode some video once in a while, but that seems to be limited by the disk.)

One of the very nice things about it is how tremendously quiet it is. The fridge compressor is not running now so all I hear is my typing on the keyboard, the cars driving by outside, and the faintest whisper of noise from the computer. It’s so quiet that my SPL meter can’t measure it.

When I walk into the room I wonder “damn, is it even on?” — and it is. It’s just that quiet. Nice.

Because I’m aware of the stupid fridge running all of the time I bought a Kill-A-Watt electric meter to figure out how much electricity it’s sucking up. It’s a couple of amps when it’s running and virtually nothing when it’s not, unless you open the door and the light comes on (apparently that’s a 40-watt bulb). I worked out the numbers and it’s costing me about $60 a year, which is probably on the high-side but isn’t enough to concern myself with.

The majority of the power sucking in the apartment comes from somewhere else: the stove, all the computer equipment, and DVRs. They’re all just a lot less noisy about it.

I haven’t gotten around to testing the computer equipment and DVRs with the Kill-A-Watt. There’s just a scary number of power cords under the desk… for approximately 20 devices (yikes). It really is hard to say what is powered from where. I could just yank the main power cord quickly and plug it in, I’ve got two UPSes for all of the important stuff — they come in handy when the circuit breaker pops.

That’s another reason to use the Kill-A-Watt — to let me know how close to the edge I am on that 15-amp circuit that runs 1/3 of the apartment.

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