From: "Eric Smith" <eric@brouhaha.com>

>Any of those should be very very close to 100% efficiency.  Just about
>the only loss would be due to noise or radiated RF energy that actually
>escapes from your building.  Noise and RF that is absorbed within the
>building will heat it.

I don't have my DEC RF08/RS08 disk system manual handy, but IIRC it claims
something like, the drive draws 600 W of electricity, and gives off 400 W
worth of heat.  The only way I could figure it is that it keeps spinning
faster and Faster and FASTER ...  Either that or the front panel lights
are a lot brighter than they seem (in which case the other 200 W of heat
is coming off of the first wall that the light hits), or maybe the bus
drivers can source some serious current.

I got my first KS10 in the winter time, at a time when I was living in an
electrically heated apartment, and yeah I really appreciated being able to
run it essentially for free.  There was no point in ever turning the blender
off either, for that matter...  We don't have a lot of nuke or hydro plants
around here though (and some times the things with "hydro" in the name are
really nukes), so I can only assume that the cost of electricity is quietly
skyrocketing in time to show up on my next few bills, I really don't think
switching on everything at once is the cheap way to save heating oil this
winter...

John Wilson
D Bit