Getting a grip on your PCs power demands

Greenbang has been, well, banging on for some time about the need for clever ways to inform people about how much energy their devices actually consume. Just about no-one, barring some really pale-skinned types who carry calculators in their pockets (real ones, not just a mobile phone one), know how much their kettle, TV or mobile phone adds to the electricity bill.

In this vein of thinking, few offices know how much all those computers are really costing them either. While some PCs are now sold with energy efficiency labels, the practice is far from widespread and once it’s in place, Bob in IT doesn’t exactly monitor it. But as this blog points out, it’s not very hard to figure out which device is chomping the most power.

 One way to start getting a handle on this is to use a simple wattmeter and begin walking around the enterprise testing various configurations. The results, I assure you, are eye-opening.

Indeed, the most eye-popping part of it is how much businesses could save, if only they looked into this a little more closely.

In our case, if we saved the full consumption of the old Dell workstation, our new system would reduce daily consumption by 6.5KWKh and save us $238 per year. At this rate, we would have pay back on the new system in less than three years on power savings alone.