Verdiem announces Edison, the free PC energy management tool for everyone

We are excited to announce today the general availability of Edison, the free PC energy management tool for everyone. The announcement was just made a few minutes ago and in case you missed it, was delivered via virtual press conference with our President and CEO Kevin Klustner joined by Microsoft’s Chief Environmental Strategist, Rob Bernard and Climate Savers Computing Initiative President, Lorie Wigle.

We are really pleased to have the support of Microsoft and Climate Savers Computing Initiative in announcing this news, and look forward to sharing this tool with you and helping you to reduce your carbon footprint at home.

To learn more or get Edison now, just go to www.verdiem.com/edison.

You can also check out Verdiem’s new Facebook page.

Unleashing Your Inner Green Hero, Part 1

There are green "intrapreneurs" everywhere in your company. Whether you tap into their creativity - and your own - is up to you.

We tend to think of our heroes as greater than ourselves - representing feats, achievements and ideals we ourselves aspire to. But many of the best ideas start with us. Regular people, inspired to extraordinary achievements. In your organization, do all of the best ideas come from the CEO? Or do they originate all across the organization?

I thought so.

Take my company, for example. Verdiem tackles the problem of IT energy waste, and has developed technology to cut PC-related power bills by up to 60%, saving some companies millions of dollars on their power bill each year. The idea came not from an MBA, or a venture capital-backed think tank, but from an individual employee of Washington County, Ore.

She left work one night and noticed that all of the computers in her office were still on, fully powered. They would likely stay on all night, she thought, for the next 14 hours or so, until everyone came back into work.

She knew that this happened every night, at offices across the country (and the globe), and it bothered her. She shared her concern with her husband that night, and it bothered him too. As a software engineer, he knew that software could likely be applied to this problem to ensure that power wasn’t wasted when computers were inactive, in a way that didn’t add any additional burden or productivity loss for users.

That’s how SURVEYOR was born. Seven years later, SURVEYOR has saved organizations more than $35 million dollars on their energy bills (and growing), and has been responsible for cutting hundreds of thousands of tons of PC-related CO2 emissions from entering the atmosphere.

That employee from Washington County is a hero. Her spark is responsible for an incredible amount of cost and carbon savings worldwide.

The Irony of Information

Over the weekend, the New York Times posted a story from Alex Williams entitled, “That Buzz in Your Ear May Be Green Noise.” As you can imagine from the title, the article was largely about the incredible amount of [sometimes conflicting] information on going green. As Williams describes it, “Two years after ‘An Inconvenient Truth’ helped unleash a new tide of environmental activism, green noise pulses through the collective consciousness from all directions.”

Ironically, I read this article shortly after I picked up National Geographic’s “Green Guide” magazine, one in a series of publications produced by top tier media corporations tailored at those interested in living a more sustainable lifestyle and understanding some of the key issues involved.

While scientists are nearly all in agreement regarding the existence of global warming, it seems consumers are reaching a level of information overload regarding “green living,” and sometimes this information is not all complementary.

In closing the article, Williams highlighted a couple organizations who have specifically tried to simplify the process for consumers, pointing to the Natural Resources Defense Council’s website www.simplesteps.org, where users can choose the depth of information they receive. In addition, Williams cited Greenpeace’s new strategy to help people to better understand environmental concerns through combining them all under the umbrella of climate change instead of separating them into distinct categories.

We’d like to hear from you - what organizations do you find produce the most consistent and helpful sustainability information?

Podcast: Brownouts, PCs and How Companies Can Protect Themselves

To follow-up on his recent post, my colleague Matt and I spent a few minutes last week talking about brownouts. If you’re interested in learning more about them, their causes and effects, and how organizations can protect themselves (and their PCs), check out this podcast.

Listen here:

When Should I Turn Off My Computer?

Occasionally, people ask how long they have to be away from their machines to make turning it off worthwhile. From the perspective of energy savings, if you are going to be away from your computer from more than 8-15 minutes, you should turn it off. However, the energy concerns are only part of the equation.

To answer this question, we have to find the point at which the extra power consumption required to shut down and restart a machine is offset by the power saved. If the machine is off for any period of time longer than that, we've saved energy.

Modern computers use much more energy when they are doing work than when they are idle. So, to find the breakeven point, I started my typical set of applications: Firefox with a couple of tabs, Microsoft Word, a media player, and Visual Studio. Then, I measured the power consumption using a wattmeter while I shutdown the machine, waited for a little while, then turned the computer back on and restarted all the applications.

Here's a graph of the energy usage on "both sides" of a shutdown and restart:

What you see in the graph is pretty typical, starting at the left of the graph, you see some idle time, followed by some activity caused by the shutdown processing, then some off time. Then you see the startup processing and finally some idle time.

Note that, even though the machine did not return to the idle power consumption for 7 minutes, the computer was usable long before that.I ran this test on a computer that's an energy hog. The hog takes about 30 seconds to shutdown and has peak wattage of 183 watts. It also takes 7 minutes (60*7 = 420 seconds) from startup to idle with peak wattage of 230 watts. The idle wattage is 115 watts. Let's just estimate by taking the shutdown cost as (0.125 hours)*(230 - 115) watts = 14.375 watt hours. The off wattage is 0.7. Therefore, the breakeven point comes when the amount of saved energy is equal to the shutdown energy. In numbers, when 14.375 = 114.3 * h, where h is the time the machine is shutdown in hours. For the energy hog, this works out to be about 7.5 minutes.

Therefore, for this machine, anytime you are going to be away from the machine for more than 7.5 minutes, you can save energy by shutting the machine down.

Some of the most efficient machines available use much less energy but it's safe to assume that, if you're going to be away from your computer for more than 15 minutes, you're probably better off, from an energy perspective, in shutting it down.

So, if you are managing large groups of machines you might consider using software that saves energy and mitigates the productivity losses by actively managing machine power states.