With energy costs soaring and people being more energy conscience, this article goes through some simple ways to help reduce the amount of energy in use by your computer equipment in your office or home.

1. Check your settings

Set your computer to run in a power-saving mode. On Windows, search for Power & Sleep settings to select a power plan to manage consumption. On a Mac laptop, you can go into system preferences and change settings for battery and adapter usage.

Adjusting the brightness of the screen can also reduce your power usage: the brighter your screen, the more power it needs. On laptops this will also reduce your battery usage.

2. Disconnect Unused Devices

Many offices have printers, scanners, speakers, external storage and other devices permanently turned on. All these devices will use power even if you are not using them. For example an average printer on standby uses 5–8 Watts and high-end printers can take as much as 30 Watts in standby!

If you are not regularly using these devices consider turning them off (especially overnight or on the weekend when they are not in use).

3. Upgrade Your Hardware

Older equipment generally use more power than newer energy efficient models. For example, traditional hard drives, are slower and consume much more power than solid-state drives (SSDs).

Older CPU’s (the computers brain) may need to work harder to keep up with your needs and thus use more power.

If you don’t work on high end graphics or play video games, you don’t need a high-end graphics card. Choose a more office friendly graphics card can cut your power usage drastically.

While I haven’t actually used these, you can actually get solar power mice and keyboards! These are powered by the sun or your office lights and save on batteries.

4.Put Your Computer To Sleep When Not In Use

You can set your computer to go to sleep or hibernate when no activity is detected after a set time. This helps ensure you do not leave the computer taking full power when you leave for a few hours or if forget to turn it off at the end of the day.

Need to optimize your computing setup at your business? Contact the IT experts at DP Computing.