The power hungry PC?

With the load shedding that hit us at the beginning of the year and rolling blackouts being the order of the day, much was said around turning off geysers, lights, air-conditioning and the like. Technology in the form of PCs largely escaped the power-off cry which is surprising when you consider the energy used by these devices.

According to Energy Star, one PC uses as much as three times the energy of a fridge freezer over the equivalent period of time. With some PCs and monitors collectively drawing in excess of 200 watts, the equivalent of five light bulbs, and with many PCs being left on all of the time, you can only imagine how the costs add up. According to sustainableIT, thought leaders in the area of Green IT in South Africa, running a single PC can cost as much as R500 per annum at current electricity rates. This will only increase exponentially over the next three years if we are to believe Nersa's expectations of 20% to 25% increases in electricity for the foreseeable future.

So why isn't it easy to turn them off?

Historically we have been told that it is bad to turn off PCs as power supplies may blow and components may fail. This is no longer the case and modern PCs have a fault tolerance level of in excess of 40 000 reboots.

Another reason why machines within companies are left on overnight is because their IT departments tell them not to switch off machines. This is done so that patching and software distribution can take place over night.

For home users and small businesses there is a free utility that can be downloaded called Local Cooling (www.local cooling.com). This allows you to schedule a power-down of your machine at a particular point in time. Some cool features (no pun intended) include an interface that pops up which shows you how much energy you have saved, as well as the equivalent in both trees and oil.

For large organisations that need centralised control and management, products like NightWatchman and 1EWakeup, developed by 1E in the UK and available locally through sustainableIT, provide you with the ability to safely shut down machines through centrally defined policies and wake them up when required for patching purposes. The real value of the solution lies in the reporting which shows a company the energy that they are using across various departments, which can then be used to tweak the policies within the solution to yield more savings.

In conclusion, PCs are power hungry devices and even putting older machines into standby does not help as they may still be drawing as much as 40 watts of energy in this state. Automate power-offs wherever possible and start to do that little bit extra in terms of saving energy.