Reduce Energy Consumption Of Your Computer And Its Accessories

1) Monitor Brightness:

We generally keep the brightness of the monitor high and usually never ever bother about the setting. But in a recent study it has been found out that if you reduce the brightness of your monitor it actually saves energy. The difference between 100% brightness and 0% brightness is approximately 12 watts of energy reduction per hour. So adjusting your monitor’s brightness by playing with the levels until you find the minimal acceptable brightness for your work can save you energy.

2) Get A LED/LCD Monitor:

If you are using a CRT MONITOR please buy a LED/LCD monitor. LED/LCD monitors has many advantages than the CRT monitors are an average 17 inch LCD monitor will take about 1/3 of the power an CRT monitor uses.ie an 150 watt 17 inch CRT monitor can be replaced by an 50w LCD monitor. Also using a CRT monitor is more damaging to your eyes and also they take up more room. Also CRT monitors generate more heat that means your air conditioner has to do more work to cool the room.

3) Laptop Charger

Most of the people leave their laptop charger plug in even after the laptop has been fully charged. Leaving the charger plugged into the wall eats energy about 30 watts per hour. So after the laptop has charged disconnect the power. Or for your convenience fix an outlet timer with the time setting just enough to power on your laptop till it get charged. After the time set the power to the laptop automatically disconnects.

4) Computer Power Settings

Play with the power settings in your computer and try to find the lowest numbers that are still convenient for your use. I.e. the time of inactivity after which the monitor, hard disks turns off etc.

5) Shutdown Your Computer When Not Used

Shutdown your computers when you are not using them.some people just keep the computers on the whole time so that the next day they can instantly turn on the computer and use it instead of waiting for the os to boot. But because of these 2 minutes you are saving you are wasting a lot of energy. Put schedules so that the computer shutdowns after it completes a particular task, these options now come standard in antivirus software, disk defragment software media players etc.. If you are using your computer to play music till you fall asleep in the night use media players like media-monkey that you can configure to shut down the computer after a time period. If you are using torrents to download you can set the computer to shut down after the download completes (utorrent).

6) Use A Smartstrip

Majority of the users after they shut down the computer just walks away and all other accessories like speakers monitors, printers, scanners, external drives etc. are still in the on condition eating up energy. So the solution for this is to buy a smartstrip. This is just like a regular extension strip but the strip monitors the current load of one outlet and turns on or off the power of the other outlets according to it. So you can set that when your computer turns off all other devices like printers etc. automatically turns off. And when the computer turns on again they turn back on. A smart strip has one or two outlets with an always on condition also so you can fix the network devices in it.

7) Remove Or Disconnect Unwanted Peripherals In Your Home Server/Media Server

If you are using your old computer to function as a NAS or home server or media server you can disconnect all the extra unwanted devices in the computer which you won’t use example DVD drives, sound cards etc. This also can save energy.