Power Down Weekend

I am not sure of the true value of this experiment but it piques my interest nonetheless. Over the weekend of the 4th-7th December users of a number of buildings on the Dundee University campus are being asked to turn off non-essential equipment so that the energy consumption of a powered down building over a weekend can be compared to a number of average readings for those same buildings over previous weekends.

It will be interesting to see what savings, if any, there are from the Queen Mother Building (QMB) as there has been a constant drive over the last few years to reduce energy consumption in the building where possible. Machines in student labs are automatically powered down overnight and weekends because of decreased usage compared with daytime during the working week. For a computing school we already have the bare minimum of hardware in the server room (which could and should be termed essential) compared with many of the computing departments at other universities that I have visited. Many of the desktop machines in research areas are shut down by their users at the end of every working day, I think partly due to many of those machines being windows boxes and hence their users being less accustomed to logging in remotely. In this instance I think that it is the *nix users who might be less environmentally friendly than the windows users. There has also been a concerted effort to replace all of the CRT screens with LCDs (although again I keep an old Iyama connected to my servers because it just works with everything whereas some LCDs can be a little pernickety with more exotic hardware in my experience). Lights within the building are already on automated systems that turn them off automatically when a certain duration of non-movement is detected — pity the Ph.D student working late at night who has to lean away from their desk periodically and wave their arms to get the lights to come back on after they automatically shut off.

To be honest I think that very little, in the way of little things like switching off IT equipment, can be done in the QMB to further reduce power consumption, although the results of this experiment may yet surprise me.