Reducing Your Power Consumption: Unplugged

There are lots of simple, free steps you can take to reduce your energy consumption and lower your power bills. You’ll be reducing your company’s carbon footprint and making your CFO happy by lowering expenses, all without investing capital. A the same time you’ll make your co-workers happy by engaging them to make their workplace greener.

Kind of like an analog to Reduce - Reuse - Recycle mantra, when it come to energy you should reduce the amount of energy you use, and for the power you DO need you should make its sources as green as possible.

The “Reduce” step is dandy because it can be free: no investment is required to start realizing significant savings. Your father yelling at you all those years to turn off the lights? He was onto something. Here are five suggestions to start you out, but I bet you can look t your actual workplace and come up with a lot more:

• Turn off lights in conference rooms, bathrooms and other common areas that are not always in use. If you want to get a little fancier you can install motion sensors but we’re trying to stick to free measures here
• Turn down your thermostat. Set the temperature a little higher in the summer and lower in the winter
• Turn off your computers overnight
• Power off any unused AV equipment. HD TV’s are notorious energy hogs, even when they are sitting idle. Plug them into a power strip and then turn off the power strip overnight
• Use less stuff. If you are part of a big company you should explore server virtualization and other measures to reduce your IT load. If you are a smaller operation unplug those appliances in the breakroom. Your local soft drink distributors all have programs to reduce power usage in vending machines.

In a later article I’ll talk about “Reduce” steps you can take that require a small investment but have pretty quick paybacks. In the meantime, I’m going to go unplug something…