Shorth

Saving Energy

You can easily reduce your electricity bill if you know how to set your computer to go into standby mode whenever there is a need. This feature will be extremely useful to you if you often take breaks, and if you want to lower your energy bill.

The best way to take advantage out of standby mode is to make sure it will go into standby after a few minutes of inactivity. It is quite easy to set up. Simply go to your desktop and right click in the place where there are no documents or folders. A pop up menu will appear. Select Properties->Screensaver->Power button. The decision that you have to make is after how long time of inactivity you will want your computer to go into standby. You can also decide after how long inactivity you want your monitor to switch off etc. If you want to lower your energy bill you might want to set this time to 5 minutes.

Over time this can save you quite a lot of money, as devices in standby mode use just a few watts of power. On the other hand, a typical desktop might constantly use from 100 watts to 350 watts of power. As you see, you will be able to save up to a few hundred watts of power. A computer in a standby mode might use even 50 times less watts.

I should probably also mention another side of the coin. It has been estimated that around 5-15% of our electricity consumption is based on devices in standby mode. This means that if you plan not to use your computer for the whole evening, it might be a better idea to simply switch it off, instead of putting it into standby mode. Anyway, I still think that standby mode is very useful.