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IT Energy Reduction: Mini-Tips
These mini-tips provided by the people in our community and trusted online sources like the EPA should help you take some small, easy steps towards reducing the energy use of your information and communications technology. These all link to places that contain more information about the subject.
Read more statistics. Return to Energy Campaign.
Individuals
Join Climate Savers Computing Initiative if you have set the sleep settings on your computer(s) and plan to buy energy efficient IT equipment. It’s no cost and helps build the IT energy conservation movement.
- Use your computer’s power management features. Power management can save nearly half a ton of CO2 and more than $60 a year in energy costs. (Climate Savers Computing)
- Turn off monitors at night and set them to sleep during inactivity during the day.
- Buy Energy Star or EPEAT – rated equipment.
- When buying monitors, replace CRTs with low-power LCDs. (Dave Welp)
- Buying new equipment or software? Browse the Climate Savers Computing product catalog.
- Download and use Verdiem’s Edison or similar third-party power management software.
- Turn off peripherals such as printers, scanners, and speakers when not in use. (Climate Savers Computing)
- Use a Smart Strip to turn off your monitor, speakers and other peripherals.
- Clean up your power strip. Look for plugs to those old calculators or speakers. (Dave Welp)
- Plug all your electronics into one power strip and turn the strip off when you are finished using your computer. (Climate Savers Computing)
- Upgrade to Windows 7.
- Plug in a Kill-A-Watt or other power meter to measure your system’s electricity use.
- Turn down the brightness setting on your monitor. The brightest setting on a monitor consumes twice the power used by the dimmest setting. (Climate Savers Computing)
- Use a laptop instead of a desktop. Laptops typically consume less power than desktops. (Climate Savers Computing)
- Close unused applications and turn off your monitor when you’re not using it. (Climate Savers Computing)
- Establish multiple power schemes to address different usage models. For example, you can create a power scheme for playing music CDs that shuts off your hard drive and monitor immediately, but never puts your system into standby mode. (Climate Savers Computing)
IT Depts
Use refurbished equipment. Some experts estimate that up to 73% of energy consumed in the life cycle of a computer is used before it is ever turned on
- Set printers, copiers and multi-function devices to enter low-power mode. (Dave Welp)
- Use refurbished equipment. Some experts estimate that up to 73% of energy consumed in the life cycle of a computer is used before it is ever turned on.
- Use a network-based power management solution like Surveyor or Faronic’s Power Save, or the EPA’s EZ GPO.
- Assign IT the responsibility of reducing IT energy consumption. Give them incentives to do it. (2009 Energy Efficient IT Report, (PDF) page 5)
Additional Recommendations from our Community Forums
- Set computers to wake-on-LAN so you can do backups and software updates
- Unplug abandoned equipment. Look for abandoned telecom equipment like old modems and PBX. (Dave Welp)
- Look for opportunities to consolidate equipment. Put multiple part-time users on the same computer if their schedules work out. (Dave Welp)
- Evaluate whether each workstation and server is really necessary or its function has been migrated to another piece of hardware. (Dave Welp)
- Make people shut down at night. Schedule patches for one night a month (or week) and make users shut down all other days. (Chris Shipley)
- Set computers to wake-on-LAN so you can do backups and software updates during off hours. “Wake on LAN technology allows a network administrator to remotely turn on or wake a computer from a sleep state. Remotely powering on computers to perform scheduled maintenance tasks allows them to be turned off over night, thereby reducing power consumption without interfering with maintenance processes.” Climate Savers Computing
Beginner
Virtualization 101 is coming. Understand what it is
Intermediate
- Don’t buy more servers, virtualize.
- Set up public access computers or a lab using virtualized desktops.
- Use thin clients instead of desktops or laptops. (Gary Lamontagne)
Beginner/Individual
- Software as a service is here. Understand what it is.
- Check out Microsoft Office Live or Google Docs.
Intermediate/IT Dept
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Don’t buy more servers; instead, look for high-quality, secure, high-availability software as a service.
- Determine for which functions SaaS is most appropriate within your overall software strategy before selecting a service provider.
- “Overall, customer relationship management (CRM) is the most popular SaaS application … CRM’s popularity is likely a result of the media exposure of high-profile vendors such as Salesforce.com.” (Gartner)
- Gartner shows us which types of functionality are delivered as Software as a Service. Office suites, CRM, HR management systems and digital content creation (DCC) seem to have most overlap for nonprofits and represent the least risk. Look for online backup solutions like Mozy.
- Check out the thoughts and concerns about SaaS from some of our forum hosts in this thread. Read past the first few posts about the initial article to get to the real discussion.
