Step 5: Use power saving features

Most electronic office equipment has facilities to reduce the amount of power they consume after given periods of inactivity or at certain hours. These low power modes, often referred to as sleep, standby or hibernation were first seen on laptops to enhance the life of the battery. Enabling power management can reduce a PC’s power consumption by 60% – quoted as US$25-75 annual saving. Multiplied by the number of PCs you operate, this can be a significant sum.

The most recognised power management standard is the energy star. While it is included in all PCs hardware (including monitors, printers etc.) it has been until recently been disable in most operating systems. Hence you have to enable it, or if it already has been check if the settings are appropriate. This can be an administrative challenge if an office is running more than 50 machines. Fortunately there are power management programs to facilitate the process.

Although servers are generally needed available 24×365 so they come with little or no power management options, it’s possible to identify some systems in every data center where certain PCs can be shut down after office hours or for certain weeks in a given month. When combined with server virtualisation and load balancing, this is a viable larger scale power efficiency strategy.