energy usage in the office

the non-profit agency i work for is looking for ideas on how to save money, im thinking energy and would appreciate any ideas on saving energy in the office and/or advise on getting a plan of action going, hopefully from anyone whos been on commitee and has dealt with energy issues

i dont want anyone doing my work, ill be researching this plenty in the next few days, but its good to get more than one angle and i know theres good advise to be found here, so any info, links, calculators, solid figures would be appreciated

anyway im thinking coffee pots, micowaves, lamps, any device not just PCs, and not just devices either but getting peeps to alter work habits as well

i would think that this would be a good topic to address at alot of offices, besides the fact that energy conservation is good for the planet, it can also be good for careers, managers love numbers and they love saving money, could be a door opener ya know

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Comments

darkerosxx

My advice: stick to your area of the business(non-profit) you can control and decide where you can save money. It's much easier to decrease costs in your area than to get people to change their habits. You'll see results faster and you can claim you're the cause.

What do you do there?

skrpune

very cool that they're doing this & getting input from everyone in the office. It makes something like this easier to implement when everyone is involved in the process.

There are TONS of ways to help reduce energy costs/usage. There's lots of simple stuff to do:
- switching to more energy efficient lighting
- turning off & unplugging equipment that's not in use [or putting it on a power strip & just turning that off for more ease of use]
- making sure heating/cooling vent filters are kept clean to improve HVAC efficiency
- using power save features of computers & monitors throughout the office
- opening shades/blinds to allow daylight in during the wintertime, closing shades/blinds during the summer...does have a slight reduction on the amount of energy needed for heating/cooling
- turning off lights when conference rooms/offices aren't in use

...and that's just what I can come up with off the top of my head. I love this idea of corporations getting into saving energy, even if it is just for the money-saving aspect of it. If I think of anything else a little more substantive, I'll let ya know.

Good luck!

HeroPsycho

Turn down the thermostat a degree or two in the winter, up a degree or two in the summer, and encourage co-workers to dress to make up for that (a sweater or fleece maybe in the winter, short sleeves in the summer).

Claymoore

HeroPsycho wrote:

Turn down the thermostat a degree or two in the winter, up a degree or two in the summer, and encourage co-workers to dress to make up for that (a sweater or fleece maybe in the winter, short sleeves in the summer).

A couple of months ago I was at a conference here in Florida where they were discussing 'green' datacenters and energy conservation. All the presenters were excited about cutting power and HVAC in the datacenters to save money, however almost all of the presenters were wearing suits and ties. That got me thinking - how much energy was being used to cool the entire hotel conference room so that those guys were comfortable wearing jackets and ties in the Florida summer? Why not change the dress code in your office so the AC doesn't have to run at 65 so guys can wear suits without sweating?

There was a blurb in a longer Time magazine article (could have been Newsweek) two years ago listing ways to help the environment that discusses this issue. There was a nationwide effort in Japan to ban ties and jackets in the office for the summer of 2006 just so they could raise the thermostat and save on HVAC costs. I don't know if anyone has any data on the energy saved during the Japanese experiment, though.

Here is a link and a quote:
http://www.earthpolicy.org/Books/PB3/PB3ch13_ss3.htm

Although we devoted a chapter to increasing energy efficiency—doing what we do with less energy—there is also a huge potential for cutting carbon emissions through conservation by not doing some of the things we do, or doing them differently. For example, in the summer of 2006 Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi of Japan announced that in order to save energy, Japanese men would be encouraged to not wear jackets and ties in the office. This meant thermostats could be raised, thus reducing electricity use for air conditioning while maintaining the same comfort level.

We changed to a relaxed dress code when we moved to our new offices three years ago. Employees saw it as a benefit and Management got to save money on AC.

hugolucky

thanks folks some good advise yes thanks

im help desk, the only help desk tech, becuase its a non-profit agency they are very focused on the minimum, but it gives me an advantage in that i have alot of responsiblities for someone who just started about a year ago, theres no competition with other techs, i dont make squat, my wife is carrying most of the house at this point, im working my ass off, but i have a goldmine of learning opps

the sysadmin and i work pretty close together in and out of the main office, he handles the heavier stuff but it is slowly trickling down to me, we have offices scattered all over two counties, alot of VPN, remote-citrix, wireless goin on, gettin some good networking experience

anyway, theres been talk about peeps coming forward with ideas on how to save the agency money, this is a way to make an impression without kissing butt

i believe a few months back i read somewhere, here probably, that group policy and/or scripts can be used to shut down PCs each night, is anyone doing this?

anyway thanks for the advise, if i find any good info in my quest ill bring it back, have a good day

HeroPsycho

You can use scheduled tasks and the shutdown.exe command. You could use shutdown.exe in combination with PowerShell using a command to create the array like grab all your machines that are running Windows XP in your domain, or get-content on a listfile of machines you wish to shutdown.

Just make sure you don't do anything like shut your desktop machines down in the middle of a scheduled WSUS patch deployment.