Testing a D-Link Green Switch

Since a while I’ve been monitoring the power consumption of devices in my home using a power meter from BespaarBazaar.nl (advised by Remi). This power meter is a good one because it is very precise. It starts measuring at 0.2 Watt.

I needed an Ethernet switch to connect my TV, NMT and PS3 to my home network. While searching for a proper switch, I came across DLinkGreen.com. It looked promising. The Green Calculator, a 8.7MB Flash app which is using a lot of CPU (hello D-Link! is this Green?!? what about HTML5?), showed me I could save 70,98% of energy (2h, 1-5 ports > 28.7Wh D-Link Green vs. 99Wh Conventional per day) using D-Links Green technology.

I couldn’t find any green switches from other manufacturers so gave it a try. I bought a D-Link DGS-1005D. It’s a 5-ports unmanaged Gigabit Ehternet switch, supporting IEEE802.3az (Energy Efficient Ethernet), IEEE802.3x (Flow Control), 9000 bytes Jumbo Frames and IEEE802.1p QoS (4 queues).

So I did some tests using the power meter. As reference I used a HP Procurve 408 (8 ports 100Mbit switch).

HP Procurve 408

Port # 1 2 3 4 5 Watt 24h 2h + 22h idle kWh annually
Adapter 1.4 33.6 33.6 12.264
4.4 105.6 105.6 38.544
m 4.9 117.6 106.6 38.909
m m 5.4 129.6 107.6 39.274
m m m 5.9 141.6 108.6 39.639
m m m m 6.4 153.6 109.6 40.004
m m m m m 6.8 163.2 110.4 40.296

m = 100 Mbit, g = 1 Gbit

Port # 1 2 3 4 5 Watt 24h 2h + 22h idle kWh annually
Adapter 0.0 0.0 0.0 0.0 🙂
1.1 26.4 26.4 9.636
g 1.6 38.4 27.4 10.001
g m 1.8 43.2 27.8 10.147
g m g 2.1 50.4 28.4 10.366
g m g g 2.5 60 29.2 10.658
g m g g g 2.9 69.6 30 10.950
g m m g g 2.7 64.8 29.6 10.804
g m m m g 2.5 60 29.2 10.658
g m m m m 2.3 55.2 28.8 10.512

m = 100 Mbit, g = 1 Gbit

First of all it’s interesting to see that the power adapter from HP is using 1.4 watts on it’s own already. Besides that it’s nice to know that a 100Mbit port uses less energy than a Gigabit port. The Green Calculator is quiet right in my case. I’m saving about 72~74% of energy.

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