5 tips to save IT Power / Energy Costs
I have observed that many IT companies spend a lot of money on IT power costs. It seems that these costs are less, however, as these are recurring costs, they can easily add up to huge costs over the years.
Based on my experience, I am listing down some tips which can help you save these costs:
- Enable Sleep and Hibernate on Windows Machines
Putting your computer to sleep after a little while of inactivity saves power. When you configure it on all the computers of your network, it results in major savings.
Most of the users do not like to waste their time by waiting for their machine to start. Windows provides Hibernate feature which takes the laptop in power-off mode while preserving the last state of the laptop. Turning on the laptop after hibernating eliminates booting the operating system from scratch. Thus, saving time. You can manually configure Hibernate on your machine or the IT admins can remotely set it for all machines in your office using a windows active directory feature called Group Policy.
2. Use laptops / thin clients instead of desktops
Desktops tend to consume 4 times more power than laptops. If there is no specific need to have a desktop, its always better to switch to a laptop. Also, thin clients consume lesser power (even lesser than laptops). They also help in ensuring data security up to a large extent.
3. Use LED projectors instead of Lamp based projectors
If your conference rooms are too big for a LED TV, it is better to invest in an LED projector instead of lamp based projectors. Lamp based projectors are power hungry and can consume 8–10 times more power as compared to LED ones.
4. Get the UPS and UPS batteries checked at regular intervals
Most of the IT organisations have UPS systems to provide power backup for their computer systems. It is recommended to get them checked every quarter to quickly identify issues which may result in high power costs.
5. Regularly measure your power consumption / usage
You would be surprised to see the benefit of regularly measuring your energy usage. At least electrical units consumed / day should be measured. Such measurements would give you patterns which are normal (and abnormal). The key is to detect abnormal patterns early, so as to safeguard from high costs.
This is not an exhaustive list of tips to save IT power costs. If you have any other ideas, please do share them with me.
