It’s 5 p.m. on a Friday – and the only thing on your mind is bolting out of your chair to head home. But it also happens to be the most important time of the week for conserving energy.
As the weather heats up, we’ll have our air conditioners blasting in our offices, but that doesn’t mean we can’t conserve energy this summer. For one, think about all of the IT equipment that usually continues running for the entire weekend in our offices without being used. Could we spend the last two minutes on Friday afternoon shutting equipment down completely? Sure! And if you have newer technology, your electronics can even do that for you.
If you’re going away for a few days, unplugging some of the power strips in your office is an efficient way to shut down several appliances at once to help conserve energy while you’re gone. While you’re at it, take a look around and power off printers, copiers, shredders and other equipment that could be using extra energy.
HP doesn’t just preach saving energy, we give users the tools they need to practice it, such as the HP Power Assistant software. HP Power Assistant is an easy-to-use desktop application that helps reduce PC energy consumption without impacting productivity. The tool allows individuals (and IT Managers for entire networks) to set up customized schedules that instruct the PC when to automatically shift into low-power energy saving states. It also estimates energy consumption based on the applied settings and reports estimated energy cost, pounds of co2 and kilowatt hours with a click of a button. For example, if you work from 8 a.m. to 5 p.m., you can use the Scheduling feature to automatically turn off the power during your off hours- even for your lunch hour -so you don’t even have to remember to do it manually.
And even if you just sign up by yourself, simply shutting down your IT for the weekend will save enough to power an entire home for 1.25 days. In fact, ENERGY STAR® estimates that power management can save up to $75 per desktop computer and monitor each year.
This year, HP, Citrix, Intel, GTSI and others have made a remarkable goal of getting 50,000 signups for Power IT Down Day. It’s an easy– just visit http://poweritdown.org/ and we’ll contact you as the day approaches in August to remind you to turn off your IT equipment for the weekend. To demonstrate how the energy savings from powering down can be put to good use we’ll again be making a donation to the Wounded Warrior Project. Last year, HP and other sponsors donated $60,000 to the project.
I encourage you all to sign up for the event, but by the time this takes place in the late summer, we’ll have already missed a tremendous opportunity to save energy. So consider the different ways you can save energy in your office and home throughout the summer to make a truly significant impact! And if you’d like to get some tips on how to “green” your home office setup, check out Darren’s post on HP’s The Next Bench blog here.
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