14 DAY TRIAL // The British university used a special software developed by Verdiem to control the everlasting rising costs of electricity.
This is part of Stafforshire University’s Green Initiative. They wanted to make sure their 4,000 computers all over the University’s labs and offices are kept in check as much as possible, when it comes to power consumption.
Jay Burke, senior IT officer at information services, at Staffordshire University said that Verdiem’s software led to an immediate saving of 60 percent on student PC power usage, and 25 percent on staff PCs, because students seem to be less concerned with the planet’s atmosphere.
On the other hand, this might be because the students really use their computers and don’t have time to put them to sleep or shut them down every time they leave the screen for some minutes and attend to the practical project or the blackboard and papers.
Nobody reported on what was the opinion of the student body, but we’re sure they may have an interesting different take on things.
It is called the “Surveyor” and it allows the University to design “policies” for each different group of PCs according to their specific usage model.
The University says that most of the students would not be aware that the software is running, and that the amount saved last year was around £27,000; that’s approximately $42,000 or 33,000 EUR.
Steve Bignell, technical director for Verdiem Company, said that the software can command the PC in and out of sleep mode or turn it completely off.
He said that: “When switched on, the average PC draws 65 watts of electricity, 3 when suspended (standby), and 1 watt when completely turned off. Each monitor also draws 35 watts when on, 2 watts in sleep mode and none when off.”
What is to be observed from his statements is that he talks about monitors that have zero power usage when in stand-by and very efficient systems that only consume 65 watts when in idle mode.
We think that this type of software can do wonders for other universities and institutes that don’t have such modern computer systems, and we all know how much higher the idle power usage is on an older Pentium D-based computer.