Small business, I recently came off a 2 year electricity contract, and got almost 60% increase.
Offpeak is now costing over $3.00 a day, which adds up to over $1000 a year, that I would prefer to go anywhere but an electricity company.
I have turned the underbench hot water down to minimum, but ~8 computers and printers run 24 hours a day.
Apart from turning them off/on every day, are there any software/hardware addin options that would just put them to sleep?
And, none of them are new, so could there be a cost case to upgrade to SSD, for example?
How to Save on off-Peak Electricity Usage?
GOFYS on 31/05/2018 - 14:11
Comments
Thanks for an awesome response. I had no idea this was available.
If i do 'Sleep when power button is pressed', is it just a keyboard stroke to wake it?Yep, just hit a key.
There's a couple of sleep options, sleep just goes into low power mode while hibernate writes everything in memory to the drive and then shuts down. Sleep wakes instantly, hibernate maybe takes 30 seconds but uses no power.
Either will use much less power than leaving them running.
For printers etc that have high standby power you could put them on timers (off at 6pm on at 8am).
In the scheme of things, a 24x7 PC uses about $1 in electricity per day. The heavy power user is air conditioning. AC can use that in an hour.
AC is doing something useful, dormant PC not so much. It's only $1 but it's still a few kg of CO2 in the atmosphere and therefore a few kg of the ground ripped up for nothing. Best to hit the switch when leaving.
8 PCs at a $1 a day is $3000 over a year.
It adds up.
You would probably be surprised how much power things consume when they appear to be off or semi-off.
I've got a washing machine that turns itself off at the end of a cycle.
Or at least I thought it did, it still uses 10 watts doing god only knows what. 10 watts isn't much, but over a year it's still $25.
Power options in Setup. Turn monitor off after 15 minutes, HDD as well. PC after an hour or so.
Switching to SSD won't do much.
Or just hit the power button as you leave, again set this in Setup to 'Sleep when power button is pressed'.
Printers shouldn't use much, laser printers will turn off the fuser after a few minutes.
Stick a power meter on them if you want to see what they use in standby.