Fight global warming with local cooling
By Davey Winder in Editorial
Posted in Green IT on
An interesting take on environmentally friendly computing hit my desktop today, the LocalCooling.com project from Uniblue Systems, better known for the Windows Task Manager on steroids, WinTasks Pro. LocalCooling.com aims to build a community of people all using the Local Cooling software utility to control the power consumption of their PCs. The idea being that if enough people join in, and the target is a perhaps rather optimistic 100 million, the global computing carbon footprint could be reduced dramatically.
Here’s how the non-commercial project works. You download a small application that automatically optimises your PC power settings to use a more efficient and effective power save mode via an easy to use interface. OK, so the Windows power settings interface isn’t exactly hard to use but Local Cooling takes things a little further in that a screen shows how much power your computer is using, by way of various components such as the display, storage, CPU and graphics card for example, then a simple slider lets you choose how much power you want to save. Better yet, it then shows you exactly how much power you have saved since installing it. An advanced tab lets you fully customise exactly how long before hard drives spin down or the PC shuts down, you can even specify a time before which it should never shut down and instruct it never to if a particular application is running. So, quite a move forward from the basic Windows power control after all.
Uniblue estimate that more than 30 billion kilowatt hours of energy are wasted every year simply through people forgetting to turn off their computers when they leave the office. Not too hard to imagine that this figure is correct, given 660 million computer users globally, consuming millions of kilowatt hours each and every day. Considering that the CO2 emissions from 15 computers are, Uniblue claim, the equivalent in energy terms to the petrol consumption used by a single car, anything that we can do, that you can do, to reduce that consumption has to be a good thing.
Being a community based project, log into the website and you can see the real time updated figures for power savings by LocalCooling users globally, translated into terms such as barrels of oil and trees saved. As I write, just a few hours into the project officially launching and with just 1185 users, LocalCooling reckons to have saved 901.89KWh, equal to 432.91 gallons of oil and 47.8 trees saved.
Oh, and let’s not forget, as a bonus you will be saving money as well as the planet. If your PC is consuming, say, 1KWh of power every four or five hours (not outside the realms of possibility for a high spec PC with peripherals attached) and is left on 24/7, over the course of 3 months you will have consumed the equivalent of a whole barrel of oil. LocalCooling.com reckons this can be extended to a barrel every 6 months if you sign up and power down when not using the computer.
Sounds like a club worth joining to me. Which is why I did…
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