Posted By Michael S Ward
Some staff (particularly accounts & admin)leave their computer equipment on over night, and sometimes over weekends etc, regardless of being told of the possibility of it being a fire risk.

I would like to try another tack and point out that this also costs money, which affects their annual bonus, and is not environmentally friendly.

However, I'm having difficulty in finding out, on average, how much per hour each piece of equipment costs if left on e.g. standard monitor, LCD flat screens, scanners, printers, computer etc.

Can anyone point me to a 'web-site' which may have this information?

Thanks

Posted By MT
Or you could buy a little plug in gadget from Maplin and find out:

http://www.maplin.co.uk/...ia=power%20meter&doy=9m2

Posted By Chris Packham
When checking on this you may need to take account of the following:
1. LCD screens actually use very little energy. We switched all our computers to LCD screens some time ago and noticed a significant drop in our electricity bill. I
calculated that it paid for the cost of the screens in about 6 weeks! Perhaps this is a case for converting all systems to LCD screens. It might actually result in a bigger saving than switching computers off! We also noticed a substantial improvement in office climate, since we no longer had the heat generation from the old standard monitors. If you have air-conditioning, could this heat be costing you? Might a change to LCD screens actually reduce the air-conditioning costs?
2. Computers should be set to go on to stand-by after a short period of non-use. When on stand-by the computer uses much less energy than when working. Again, we set all our computers to go on to stand-by after a pre-determined time and noticed a saving in energy costs.
3. Our investigation showed that the biggest user of electricity when left on overnight or over the week-end was not the computers but the colour laser-printer. Even on stand-by this was using more energy that a computer when fully active!
These facts may have a significant effect on your cost calculations.

Posted By Michael S Ward
Thanks for the info provided.

Have been on the carbon trust site and there is some useful info there, but couldn't find anything in terms of 'money' e.g. running a standard monitor for 8 hours uses x-pence, running an LCD monitor for 8 hours uses x-pence etc, hence like the idea of the plug in monitoring devices.

A standard cost benefit analysis is probably the only way to get new 'power saving equipment' agreed by the accountants.

Thanks to all who have supplied information so far.

Mick

Posted By Chris Packham
Keith

Soryy, but we didn't actually do any calculations. We are only a small consultancy. What we noticed was that in the period following the conversion to the LCD screens our electricity bill was substantially less, and there was nothing other than this that could have accounted for it.

It might be worth obtaining one of the instruments that measure actual power consumption and run a check. The results could be interesting.

Incidentally, for the same reason we are now considering converting all television sets at home to LCD!

Chris