Sunday, March 9, 2008

Green Computing - Cut The Carbon Footprint of Your PC!

I really hadn't given a lot of thought on how to cut the carbon footprint of my pc, thinking there was no way to cut it further than using screensavers and sleep modes. Well, I'm going to share with you a couple of different ways of cutting your pc's carbon emissions.

A home user running a single computer can make a valuable contribution by saving up to 135kg of CO2 per year and approximately £50 in electricity by using the ecobutton
The Eco-Button
The first method is fairly simple and cheap, it relies on a little bit of software and a small button attached by USB to your pc, which quickly sends your pc into a deep-sleep mode, using less power than your pc would on standby and quickly waking at the touch of a key when you need it. It's much faster than navigating through your start menu, so it's more likely that you'll actually use it.
Eco-ButtonAlso, As it's cheap (approx £15) it's quickly pay for itself in energy savings. It will work with all OS's, Vista, XP, windows 2000 & laptops. Also available is downloadable software to monitor your energy use and the savings you are making with your eco-button.
You can find the eco-button for sale at
Nigel's Eco Store


IWOOT.Com

Some older computers and some HP computers may have difficulty in reactivation. This is a problem with the computer bios and not the software. It will work with all OS's, Vista, XP, windows 2000 & laptops. Also available is downloadable software to monitor your energy use and the savings you are making with your eco-button.
I found using the ecobutton with my old HP that reactivation was achieved by actually hitting the main pc on button, keyboard click, mouse clicks and clicking the ecobutton didn't work. Although when in the ecobutton powersaving mode the button would stop glowing/flashing by clicking on it.


The standard 200W PC:
running 8h a day, 5 days a week, 50 weeks in a year = 400 kwh at 10c/Kwh = $40
running 24/7 days a week, 50 weeks in a year = 1680 kwh at 10c/Kwh = $168

A 30W "green pc":
running 8h a day, 5 days a week, 50 weeks in a year = 60 kwh at 10c/Kwh = $6
running 24/7 days a week, 50 weeks in a year = 252 kwh at 10c/Kwh = $25,2

*UK prices for electricity are at least 10/Kwh so just change the $ to £


Very PC
The more astounding discovery when researching energy saving pc's was the range of Business and Home PC's designed and Built by Very PC. With PC's that had an average power usage starting from 29watts I was astounded, my current monster pc uses almost 20x this!
VeryPC was awarded the title of Environmental Innovator in the PC Pro Awards 2007. Justly so, as their range of pc's and innovations in energy saving have been revolutionary in the way that they combine high performance computing with energy saving designs.

The GreenPC Treeton is a tiny pc delivering quite a punch. At the size of a shoe-box it contains a dual-core AMD 2.1GHz processor, integrated ATI X700 graphics with HDMI, up to 2GB RAM and up to 250GB hard disk. The standard option machine has a base energy consumption of just 29W (according to the London Environment Centre), a fraction of typical PC's!

For the green business or corporate sector looking to cut their carbon emissions, energy bill and present green credentials to their customers Very PC also have extensive experience of providing networking solutions and business servers.

The Janus GreenServer is an ideal solution to a company wanting a powerful server base, with up to 4TB of storage! The Janus Server is in fact two servers , split down the middle, Each Server contains 8 processor cores, up to 32GB RAM, and up to 2x1TB Hard disks. The Default configuration has this unit Running at 112W idle per server in the base specification.






Next time you switch your PC on, have a think about it's carbon footprint!

Or even consider offsetting some of your other carbon emissions with Carbon Clear

I recently wrote more about Green Computing On Squidoo - Go take a look!