Green Computing

Here are some statistics for computers at Williams.

Check out our list of Green Links for more info about green computing

Save Electricity

Turn your computer off at night

Many years ago computers could get damaged by the initial surge of power when they started up, and so at that time it made sense to keep them on all the time. These days the technology has improved to the point where start-up wear-and-tear is negligible and so it makes sense to turn it off when you don't need it.

If you really can't stand to wait for it to start up the next morning, at least put your computer in standby mode at the end of the day. You'll still save 95% of the electricity used compared to leaving it on but idle while you're away.

Turn off your monitor when you're away from your desk

Monitors are generall easy and fast to turn off and back on. Even if you're only going to be out for 20 minutes there's no reason not to tap the moniotor power button on the way out.

Use Your Computer's Power Management Features

Set your computer to go into sleep / stand by when it's inactive for too long. A computer in sleep mode uses about 5% the energy of one running a "screen saver". While you're at it, set up your monitor to likewise go to sleep. One site that has useful information about this is http://www.xvsxp.com/system/power_management.php.

Windows XP

1. Right-click on your desktop and select Properties from the menu that pops up - this brings up the Display Properties dialog
2. Click on the Screen Saver tab - this brings you to the screen saver options
3. Click on the Power button (towards the lower right part of the dialog box) - this brings up the Power Options Properties dialog
4. In the Power Schemes tab (the one that shows up when the dialog appears) you can set the time out for your monitor, harddisk, and whole system - i.e. the amount of time from the last user action (keyboard or mouse) after which the system will sleep or turn off that component. It's worth setting your monitor for something relatively short (10 or 20 minutes) since it comes back on pretty quickly. Your hard disk can be set to something a bit longer (maybe 45 minutes, or perhaps 2 hours), and your whole system to something longer yet (maybe 2 or 3 hours, or shorter if you don't mind waiting a minute or so for your system to wake back up once it's gone to standby).

Macintosh

1. Go to the Apple Menu, select System Preferences.
2. Click Energy Saver
3. For the Sleep section, put the computer to sleep after an hour (or less). You can put the display to sleep much earlier, say 15 minutes.

Turn off un-necessary accessories

If you're not listening to something, keep the speakers turned off. If they're on then they draw 10 or more watts just sitting there.

Unplug little used devices

Most electronic devices these days draw some power even then they're 'off' (known as a vampire load). If you're going to be away for a vacation or a conference or some such, then unplug them before you leave.

To make this more convenient, plug all your stuff into a powerstrip instead of directly into the wall, and simply turn off or unplug the powerstrip.

When purchasing a new computer, look at how much energy it uses

There's a lot of variation between how much electricity various computers use. Most manufactures websites have that kind of information (links here) and a bit of research on the internet can usually find even more.

In general, a laptop uses about 1/3 the electricity of a desktop, but that does have to be balanced against the extra cost and greater fragility of a laptop. Still, it's worth considering.

In general the newer, faster, more powerful machines use more electricity (even when idle, and even when sleeping) than other machines.

Save Paper

Read things with out printing them out

Not printing things at all is the easiest way to save paper. Certainly not everything can easily be read / used with out printing it out, but make sure that when you do print something you actually need to do so and aren't just doing it out of habit.

Print double sided (duplex)

Many printers these days (and pretty much all the public printers at Williams) support double-sided (aka.a. duplex) printing. While it's not appropriate for every situation, any time you can print duplex you save 50% of the paper.

How to set up your computer to print duplex

List of our public printers, with notes about which ones support duplex printing

Use used paper for scratch / note paper

Before you recycle that mailing / print out / etc. consider using the blank side for scratch or note paper. Doing that instead of taking notes on clean, new sheets of paper can save a surprising amount.

Be careful where you print

Be mindful when you go to print something. Are you sending it to the right place? It happens that a paper can print in a location you don't expect, so when you go to pick it up at hte local printer it's not there, so you print another copy (or several more) before figureing out what happened and either runnning to the remote location to get your report or printing out yet one more, this time locally.

Print the minimum you need

Be mindful about how much extraneous stuff you're printing. Use the print preview function to figure out which pages you actually need printed, and then print only those ones. Avoid blank or chaff pages from printing spreadsheets or web pages.

Green Your Office

Replace incandescent bulbs with compact flourescent bulbs or LED lights

If you have an office or desk lamp that uses incandescent bulbs, replace them with the new compact flourescent, or even better (but more espensive) LED, bulbs. CF bulbs use 25% or less the energy of incandescent ones. LEDs use 10% or less.

One note about CF bulbs, they do take 30 seconds or a minute to come up to full brightness, so don't be put off if they don't seem as bright right when they're turned on.

Get rid of mini-fridges

Get rid of all the mini-fridges! Use a single, larger community fridge. The larger ones are more efficient both in how they're used (most min-fridges are mostly empty most of the time)) and how well they run (they use much less power to cool an equivalent volume).