PC Power

Had an interview on Friday with someone from HEEPI (Higher Education Environmental Performance Improvement) who have just started a 12 months study for JISC "Managing Environmentally Sustainable ICT in Further and higher Education". Funnily enough, contact was made via this blog because of the post about energy savings in data centres. We talked a lot about a project we carried out last year, looking at energy usage of PCs, given that we have about 12,000 of them on campus. Usage various tremendously between different makes and models, and also between different states of the PC. For example when your PC is idle and goes to sleep, you might think it’s using practically no energy, but we found some models that were using nearly as much in that state as when active. Our recommendations now are that all machines are turned off at night, and the power supply is also turned off – many machines draw power from the socket even when they are turned off! Of all the machines tested, the Mac mini used the least power – by a long way. Sun Rays were also very low, and that’s one of the reasons we’re looking at using them to run our new managed service which will be thin client based.