Saving Power in your Home Office

cweditor writes "Rob Mitchell shows how he measured energy use of all his home office equipment, and then targeted the energy pigs for replacement. With better equipment choices, he'd save $90/year. If you've got more than a couple of computers and printers at home (and if you're a Slashdot reader, you probably do), the savings would be a lot higher. Includes detailed formulas as well as a spreadsheet on monitor energy usage."

Comments

Saving elsewhere

[luvirini]

A typical slashdotter will likely save way more both nature and money in a year by just not buying one of the gadgets..

Ofcourse saving electricity is good, but often the total enviromental cost of disposing of the previous thing and the making of the new more energy efficient thing is way above any savings made by the new one..

Re:Saving elsewhere

[TheDormouse]

Surely not buying a washing machine would be more efficent too, just do your dishes in the sink.

No. A full load in the dishwasher actually uses less resources than doing dishes by hand. And the dishwasher will actually clean and disinfect the dishes properly, whereas most people doing dishes by hand won't actually kill all the bacteria while using at least twice as much water.

love to see more of this

[misanthrope101]

There are many energy-saving questions I'd like to see investigated. For example, I have an old Subaru, and I'm not sure if I should buy a new fuel-efficient car. Mine isn't a guzzler, and I can afford a newer one. But that new car, even if it gets twice the MPG, costs energy to make--would an extra 20mpg offset the energy cost of making the car, and if so, how long would it take? Money aside, I don't know whether to keep the beater (which gets about 20mpg) or get a newer car.

Also, what about TVs? I have a 19" old-fashioned TV. Cheap, and it works. But I'm looking at a 32" LCD. The LCD might pull less electricity, but would the difference offset the energy costs of making the TV?

Re:love to see more of this

[pinkocommie]

Craigs List? Or any other classifieds variants. You're making the presumption that both of those are going to waste when in both cases you'll be passing them on to someone else who would've gotten them from another source otherwise (which could be new or used)

Re:90 whole dollars

[eln]

How much money does it cost to save that much energy as well? I kind of scanned the article, but one thing I did notice was that $200 was spent on a new LCD monitor to replace the CRT. If we assume 100% of the energy savings came from that one purchase (which it didn't), it will take more than 2 years to recoup the money spent on that one purchase, and there was no indication that there was anything wrong with the older monitor other than that it used too much energy.

I would advocate buying newer more energy efficient equipment as your old equipment dies, but I would not advocate going out and replacing perfectly good equipment with more energy efficient (and more expensive) alternatives. It will not only cost you a lot of money, but will also mean more waste from throwing out perfectly good equipment that will likely end up in a landfill.

I have another way of saving electricity

[ODD97]

I built a system that turns off my lights when I blink. My blinks last approximately 1/4 second, and I blink roughtly 20 times per minute, saving me 5 seconds per minute, or 20 seconds per hour. That makes 160 seconds (2 minutes) per workday. over the course of a year, that's 16 minutes of power waste that I am avoiding without changing any equipment significantly.

... of course, alligator-clipping the blink sensors to my eyelids stings for a little bit, but you get used to it really fast. It's a small price to pay to save the world.

Sometimes, the device is not the problem

[F1Rumors]

Rather, the brick that converts the AC to DC is inefficient.

My savings came from taking an efficient computer power supply (80-85% efficient, depending on the load) and running my own 12V and 5V supplies direct to the devices that use those voltages [includes: cable modem, wireless router, usb hub, network disk, a GPS/VHF radio and a camera]. When I can be find time to finish the job, I'll do the maths and buy the parts to add 19V and 6.8V for two other devices.

In practical terms: I no longer have a collection of bricks generating heat, so I waste considerably less energy; I plug only one device in to the UPS, eliminating a lot of wires, so the installation is simple and tidy; and there's a bonus: the fan on the power supply keeps air moving over the equipment whenever heat builds up...