How to keep your PC energy efficient
The New York Times offers some practical advice on saving the massive amounts of energy consumed by computers and other electronics each day. There's some really useful tips here for keeping your PC or Mac from becoming an energy hog. The Readers Digest version:
- Try the Kill-A-Watt EZ Plug Power Meter ($25, available online at places like this) to help show you how much power is being used by each appliance. The author of the article discovered his PC was using 134 watts all night every night. (Think about it - that's a 60-watt incandescent on for two hours, or a compact fluorescent on all night.) This was in addition to the TiVo, digital cable, cable box, etc.
- An insane statistic from the department of energy: "40 percent of all electricity used to power home electronics is consumed while the products are turned off." So basically, if there was no such thing as "sleep" or "standby" mode, our electronics would only consume 60% as much power.
- The author offers the CO2 Saver as a good way to ensure your computer sleeps when it should be sleeping, since Windows seems to be pretty unreliable when it comes to powering down like it's supposed to. I tried it out on my computer, and it seems to be pretty effective without hogging computer resources. My only complaint is that I wish it would start minimized, since it takes up a pretty big chunk of the desktop when it's maximized, and I'd prefer it to just run in the system tray quietly by default instead of having to press 'minimize' every time.
- The article also has a bunch of little tips when it comes to buying new computers, suggesting that buyers go for the new Energy Star requirements that go into effect in July, and saying it's better to generally go for smaller computers with less parts (like an iMac or a laptop) than a bigger, less efficient tower PC.
- In the end the results were significant: "Tweaking can pay off. Annually, my desktop PC is now using 73 percent less energy — saving me $119 a year and depriving the earth of 1,405 more pounds of CO2." Wow. Think about the thousands of pounds of CO2 you could save from the atmosphere just by changing some PC settings. It's worth it.
posted by Martin @ 11:36 AM
2 Comments
2 Comments:
yaaay i'm glad you posted this. It will be interesting to see how our electricity bills come out (once we actually have an account, heh). transportation emissions (surprisingly) only make up 20% of the CO2 the US pumps into the atmosphere every year. almost all of the rest is from power plants, with the residential sector's needs making up about 40%. great article in this week's economist about how big business is really starting to invest in the technology to reduce their emissions, but i fear that where change really isn't going to happen is in people's homes, where sometimes it's easier to leave the plasma screen on all night and just pay off the energy bill than to make a conscious effort to save those pounds of carbon. i don't really doubt that eventually auto makers will reform - they have to because oil is running out. coal we have no shortage which is forcing change, and a lot of people don't care enough even to take simple steps like downloading a program that will put your computer to sleep.
I like this. Alot. Mostly because it's practical, and it saves me money. If capitalist money-grabbing tendencies all Americans possess can be used to make the world greener, I think the environmental movement would be much stronger.
I know that I leave my computer on ALL of the time. I'm going to try and change this now that I know. Thanks!
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