May 2008: A Note from Jeff Mack
Deliver More Green to Your Bottom Line: No-Brainer Strategies that Save and Improve Equipment Performance

Whether you believe in global warming or not, there is no escaping the green wave sweeping our conscience and corporate America. Here in the northwest we have appreciated the outdoors and the environment for quite some time. Now, the opportunities for minimalizing our impact, conserving precious resources, and raising sustainability awareness are endless. The resources we use and consume, such as paper, fuel, plastics, and electricity, are an obvious place to start.

For example, let's examine electricity. Our computer systems all run on electricity: What are some specific things we can do to be more aware of and hopefully conserve the electricity they use?

No-Brainer Strategies You Can Use
Turn off equipment when not in use. Or at the very least, use the sleep or hibernate mode that detects usage and automatically throttles down equipment when possible. You can also use smart power strips that will automatically turn off other devices associated with your main device. For example, if you plug your laptop, printer, and display into the Smart Strip, it can sense when the laptop is shut down and then automatically shut off the power to your other devices. This alone can reduce energy consumption by 25% to 50% - or more.

Know your energy consumption. Do you know how much energy your computer system and its various components use? A simple wattmeter such as the Kill-A-Watt Electricity Usage Meter will tell you how much wattage is being drawn by your systems. It's inexpensive and easy to use: Simply plug your computer device into the meter and select the watts button. The meter then provides a readout of your consumption. As Lord Kelvin said, "If you cannot measure it, you cannot improve it."

Shop wisely. When it comes to shopping for new computer systems and peripherals, you are no doubt accustomed to shopping for the optimum configuration of processor speed, disk space, memory and display options. Why not include energy efficiency? Just make sure that the products you are buying contain the energy star rating. Check here for a current list of Energy Star certified products.

Another buying criterion you can use is performance per watt. To do this accurately would require performance benchmarking tools. In our case we can simply estimate it for illustration purposes. Let's say you are considering replacing a 4 year old computer with a new one. Given Moore's law et al, it is a safe bet to assume that the new computer has at least twice the power (combination of processor, bus, disk I/O, memory etc.) of the unit being replaced. Let's also reasonably assume that the new unit is energy star rated to consume 110 watts. By contrast, the older unit consumes 200 watts. Combining the power and efficiency improvements reveals that the new unit provides nearly a 400% improvement in performance/watt over the older unit. By any measure, that's a huge leap forward.

Know your energy cost. Once you have determined your energy consumption per device, you can go to Seattle City Light's website, for example, and simply plug in the wattage and the number of hours of usage per day and just like magic, it tells you how much that device costs to run. (Calculator)

You will probably find that most computer devices cost between $50 and $150 per year to run. Multiply that number times the number of devices you use and it starts adding up. Applying these suggestions just plain feels good for everyone involved and it can deliver more green to your bottom line. And that's the bottom line!