Hello All

 

i've been looking at energy consumption (and how to effectively reduce it) in my own office and recently purchased an energy meter which i can plug equipment into. This meter displays the current power consumption in Watts and an accumulated energy consumption in kWh depending upon how long i have left it in.

 

I was particularly interested in testing the savings that could be made by persuading my colleagues to switch off their processers and monitors at the end of the day. However, i have found that both the processer and monitor seem to use more power than i was expecting when powered down. For example, an optiplex 620 machine with a 1907FPt monitor still use about 30W and 16W respectively when i shut down. I was expecting the "sleep" or "off" power consumption to be either zero or <2W as is suggested by the dell environmental data sheets shown here

 

http://www.dell.com/content/topics/global.aspx/corp/environment/en/prod_datasheets?c=us&l=en&s=corp

 

Has anybody else found this? can anybody give me an explanation as to why this difference occurs? I've been telling my colleagues to turn their monitors off instead of leaving them on standby but it appears this makes no difference in energy consumption terms! seems the only way to stop them drawing power when not being used is to actually unplug them and this is not a realistic solution!

 

Thanks

 

Mike