Hi All,

Just wondering if anyone can assist with a debate in our office. We're about to run a Energy/Recycling campaign and the subject of turning electrical appliances off (obviously when not in use, not because we can't be ars3d working) has come up as a topic.

There are the obvious appliances like printers, copiers, coffee machines etc that we can turn off by use of timers, but the biggest issue are our LCD monitors. There's approx 750/800 in total, which predominantly are left on (standby) overnight and over the weekend.

Once the base unit or laptop has been powered down, the monitor goes on to standby. 99% of them are used between 08:00 - 17:00hrs Mon - Fri, so in use for 9hrs per day, then on standby for the other 15hrs a day and ALL weekend. The questions therefore are:

1) Given that as there is heat being given off by them all even in standby mode, then there is still power being used somehow. Are there different amounts of power/energy being consumed when in use and in standby?
2) If so, is there a way of calculating it? (I've tried contacting Dell, but no one seems to want to help out).
3) There are thoughts that some LCD's/plasmas etc should be left on standby, but does any one if this is just idle chat or is there some reasoning behind it?

Any thoughts/good points gratefully accepted.

Thanks.

Sandy.

yep i would definatly get a flow meter as the consumption on stanby could be anywhere between 3 and 30% it will vary from manufacturer to manufacturer

why not set up the power managment to turn off the computer after say 90 mins

also get those socket extensions that have a primery socket and when say the tower powers down all the sockets go dead turning off your screen printer speakers ect

CWatters - Good call. Google had just the answer. Didn't twig with me to put that into a search engine. The wonders of the WWW eh!

Londonman - Might just try a couple of the plug in energy monitors as I can also use them on other appliances when I'm done.

Big_all - Power Management. Might have to contact my IM/IT dept about that one. I've got it set up at home but, not sure how they'd go about setting it up on that many PC/laptops. Socket extentions, hmm, love to, but they've already told me that if it costs, do without!

Thanks for the advice. It give me more direction on this subject.