David Tanaka

The soaring price of gasoline provides yet another benefit to working from home part or all of the time. But if you work at home remember that the cost of running an office, which might otherwise be paid for by your employer, now comes out of your pocket. A few extra devices might not seem like a big deal, but why not keep as much of your money as you can. There are some simple things you can do to reduce your energy bill and have a greener home office at the same time.

Let’s start with something we all have: the AC/DC adapters for notebook computers and other electronics devices. What we commonly refer to as power bricks have been ID’d as big time energy robbers by many organizations in many countries. When plugged in power bricks may be drawing power even when they are not powering the device they were intended for, and are thus responsible for what are known as phantom or ghost loads that drive up our utility bill without providing any benefit. Each brick may not be sipping much, but how many do you have floating around your house? I was surprised to count more than a dozen that we regularly use around our house for cellular and cordless landline phones, external drives, notebook computers, scanners, PDAs, rechargeable battery chargers, Internet access points, routers, USB hubs, etc.

The US-based Electrical Power Research Institute estimates that there are six to 10 billion AC/DC adapters in use around the world. It says the best units are up to 90 per cent efficient, but some can be as low as 20 per cent efficient. The institute estimates that power adapters are responsible for needlessly consuming around two per cent of the energy produced in the United States, and better efficiency could save around US$3 billion and reduce carbon dioxide emissions by 24 million tons per year. (Other countries’ estimates of waste are even higher, up to 13 per cent.)

The simplest way to stop these little robber bricks is to cut power to them when they are not being used. If you use a power bar, you could use its switch to functionally “unplug” anything connected to it, but this all or none approach doesn’t often work because you may want to keep some devices on. Interestingly, Belkin has announced the Conserve Surge, which is a surge protected power bar that allows you to turn off power to some outlets while leaving others powered. This product should be available by fall, with a price of around $50.

Power bricks aren’t the only sources of phantom loads. Any instant-on device like a computer or a monitor in standby is also drawing power, albeit at a lower rate than when the machine is being used. In 2007, the US Environmental Protection Agency toughened the Energy Star logo program so that electrical and electronic products would have to meet higher standards of energy efficiency in order to use the Energy Star logo on their products. The Canadian government has adopted large parts of this revised program (see www.oee.nrcan.gc.ca/residential/personal/ for categories of products falling under the program). The standard for office equipment addresses several categories of gear, including computers and monitors; printers, fax machines and multifunction devices; scanners and so on.

A lot of the standard deals with power use during standby or sleep modes. With desktop computers, for example, to qualify for the Energy Star logo, models have to consume no more than two watts in standby mode, four watts in sleep mode and, depending on the class of the computer, between 50 watts and 95 watts in idle mode. For notebook computers, the baselines are lower: one watt or less in standby mode, 1.7 watts or less in sleep mode and 14 watts (for Class A notebooks) to 22 watts (for Class B notebooks) at idle. Another part of the standard deals with power efficiency. For desktop computers, the internal power supply has to be 80 per cent efficient at 20 per cent, 50 per cent and 100 per cent of its rated output.

A revised Energy Star standard called the Tier 2 Energy Efficiency Metric will go into effect on January 1, 2009, which will mandate better performance as well as a broader set of performance criteria, such as the ability to maintain full network connectivity while in sleep mode.

Most of the tech industry tries to meet Energy Star and the European Union’s RoHS (removal of hazardous substances) standards and also have their own green programs, which is good because a lot of the materials going into the manufacture of computer components are definitely not green. Dell vowed last year to become the greenest technology company in the world. Apple too has publicized the efforts it is taking to eliminate the amount of toxic materials it uses in the manufacture of Macs. But in fact most PC makers have given the nod to green in their manufacturing and recycling practices.

This means that for us consumers, it is getting easier to buy green. However, the choices are sometimes not as clear cut as we might hope. For example, flat panel displays have been largely hailed as an earth friendly choice because they contain far less lead and other hazardous materials and use far less power than CRT displays. But The Guardian (www.guardian.uk.org) recently ran a story about a chemical called nitrogen trifluoride, which is used in the manufacture of flat panel TVs. The Guardian article says that it is about 17,000 times more potent than carbon dioxide as a contributor to global warming.

Until next time,
David Tanaka