The Greener Home Office

Being more environmental, can be more economical.

Steve Smith explains how to make your home office more ecologically friendly, and be more economical in the process.

Episode #3-11 released on November 25, 2012

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A greener office, isn't just an office that is more ecological, but it can be economical. The idea of being more ecological in the office is more directly implied by power consumption, and how to balance and even reduce the amount of electricity required to run an office, we are going to focus on the home office. Now, tweaking a computer in Windows, Linux, even Mac, is easy enough to do, and you only have a few settings in computers to change, and a possible change in behavior, as well.

Let's talk about your computer and monitor. A lot of computer users leave their computer running, screen and all. A few changes to this can significantly reduce power consumption, which leads to a savings in your electric bill.

Let's talk about the possible power settings you can employ in all operating systems. First, the monitor has the option to be turned off, or to be placed in standby, in most modern monitors after a set amount of time that no users have been using it. Some desktop monitors consume about 45 watts of electricity, simply being on, in standby this may be reduced to 1 watt in most monitors, just enough to flash the light. Turning off the monitor brings it to 0 watts, and being turned off by the computer is possible.

Your computer, also, has several options you can employ to reduce your power consumption. First, allowing your hard drives to be turned off after a set amount of time, allows for your computer to save power. Furthermore, allowing your computer to go into hibernation, not sleep mode, allows your computer to almost turn off, and allow for a faster boot by simply pressing a key on your computer. There is a near 100% drop in power usage when in hibernation. Turning off the computer allows for a closer to 100% less power consumption, only because the keyboard, and the rest of the entire computer, is now off.

Using a backup UPS device such as the APC Back-UPS ES BE750G 10-Outlet 750VA 120V UPS System, allows you to be even more ecological by having it close devices that are connected whenever the computer is either in hibernation or powered down. This prevents a vampire-like drainage of electricity that occurs all the time whenever these devices are connected to an outlet. Whenever your computer would turn off, or go into hibernation, the backup UPS, turns off the control ports, all saves electricity in the process.

Other actions you can do to make it more energy efficient include turning off all printers, scanners, computers, laptops, etc... Powering down any NAS drives, or enabling scheduling to have them power down by themselves. You may, also, add a surge bar to a control port on the aforementioned APC device to allow things such as chargers, external hard drives, etc... to be turned off whenever your other devices are off.

Doing all this will not be more ecological, but economical, as well. These actions are considered to be environmentally friendlier because of the common usage of fossil fuels or nuclear power plants to create electricity for us to use. If the demand is lowered, fewer fossil fuels are burned, fewer nuclear power plants are required, and thus, being more ecological, makes economic sense.

Next week, installing Ubuntu 12.10, in Windows 7 Professional, and the whole process Windows side.

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Host : Steve Smith | Music : Jonny Lee Hart | Editor : Steve Smith | Producer : Zed Axis Productions

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