While glancing over my feeds at work, I saw an article on Ars Technica titled Ars System Guide: it’s easy being green, and I found it to be a worthwhile read. In the future, when Meghan finally needs a new computer for real, and not some Frankensteinian computer that’s been brought back from the brink of death multiple times, I’ll re-read this article and then go find some more up-to-date ones to read. Since her HP Pavilion is going on seven years or so, it probably is not very efficient at it’s power usage, and it does use a wonderful CRT monitor and, due to the cobbled-together parts, it has two internal hard drives and also uses an external one as well, so those use power and create heat. On a related note, she was trying to find some files that weren’t on the backup I had made, and so I plugged in the old hard drive that was suffering from the click-of-death. Apparently, leaving it alone for a handful of weeks has made it work, or at least it worked for the 10 minutes I had it connected.
One thing we’ve been doing is trying to find ways to re-wire some of the electronics so they go through surge protectors so that a switch can kill the entire power draw of those items. While we’ve done this with the computers, we just did this with most of the items in the “entertainment center” in the living room. Personally, I consider my computer to my entertainment center, but that’s just me. Anyway, the DVD player, Wii, and television are now on a power strip so that they can be turned off to stop any power draw when not in use. Another minor thing that we’ve been making sure to do is to unplug any power adapters that are not being used to charge a device, namely the cellphones, but also for the battery charger and iPods.
Now that we have our IRS return, I’m debating whether or not to get something like the Kill-A-Watt to help determine other ways to decrease power usage in our apartment. Fortunately, there aren’t too many items in the apartment for us to worry about, and the skylights really help with keeping the place lit up through most of the day.
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