When I travel to the Far East or Scandinavia, it's common that hotel rooms have a master power switch. When you enter your room, you slide the room key into a slot, which activates a breaker and powers on the lights and sockets. The energy savings occurs when you leave the room and take your key - it's impossible to leave on a light, air conditioner or television.
Throughout Harvard Medical School and Beth Israel Deaconess we use Energy Star compliant devices which power down when unused. However, computers and monitors are only one element of the total power drain. Printers, speakers, and scanners continue to draw power, even when unused.
How about using a power strip that senses when the CPU hibernates and then powers down all peripherals?
The APC Power-Saving Essential SurgeArrest 7 outlet is such a device.
The Power-Saving SurgeArrest not only safeguards your equipment from damaging power transients, it also helps lower total power usage. "Master/Controlled" outlets are designed to detect when your computer is asleep and it automatically powers "off" connected peripherals. Other features include:
• Noise filtering
• Protection Working Indicator
• Resettable circuit breaker
• Right Angle Plug
• Site wiring fault indicator
As I wrote about in my previous Green IT blog entries such as Kill-a-Watt, we're approaching power reduction holistically. I oversee 20,000+ computers and 10,000+ printers, so a power strip that shuts off all connected devices when the computer is not in use is really cool!
No comments:
Post a Comment