Energy saving potential for large companies
Today I was walking through our buildings when a thought came into my mind as I was looking at workplaces where the people were not present at that time.
What I was looking at was an empty chair, a desk and a laptop standing on it. In our company we have standardized laptops and system images which are centrally managed and maintained (altough it needs some user-interaction to activate the regular updates). This one was nothing different and so I saw it lying idle with the brand new corporate screensaver we had to install a few weeks ago.
Maybe it has something to do with our corporate image update but it is one of those screensavers which display our company name and different slogans fully 3D animated all the time. When I stepped nearer to the laptop I heard it's cooling fans running at full speed and hovering my palm over its keyboard reveiled it to be emitting quite some warmth.
"What the..." I thought, these things normally are silent all the time even when the user is doing some heavy-duty work, so I kept my eyes open for other lonely laptops and desktops. And really, all computers which were "idle" and had the default screensaver activated were running at maximum fan cooling, while the rest of it, being used by people, were cool and silent.
Can it really be that a company (incidentially or not) increases it's energy footprint when no one is at work? I mean, the power consumption is low when all people are in and busy and it is high when no one is working (for example at night) and the computers are coping with tedious screensavers.
I see a large possibility of energy savings there... Well, I also suspect the screensaver being just thrown together with some lousy .scr-creator or just showing a (HD-quality) video because I cannot imagine these few fade-in effects needing that much brute calculation force that it heats up our computers so enormously.
So please headquarter, turn off this screensaver which just costs us more money than it brings us PR at our customers and in office. And honestly, it's disturbing and nobody looks at it anyway.
I occassionaly see other potential savings too, like opened windows and air conditioning at full power or using air condition to cool down rooms in the morning instead of just opening windows for a few minutes, but these are topic for another rant sometime...
<sarcasm>
Hm, maybe the screensaver IS intentionally and annoying, so that people turn off their screens when they aren't working on their computers. In that case I would have to rethink if the increased consumption of the computer is compensated by the deactivated screen...)
</sarcasm>