Low Impact Living/ Jane Powers In June last year, according to the Central Statistics Office, 797,700 Irish households had a computer: that's 54.9 per cent of all homes. In the intervening year, that figure has probably jumped nearer to 60 per cent. So the chances are that there's a machine (or two?) humming away somewhere in your house.
Depending on its make and hardware, and on how active a computer it is, it may be using anything from a couple of watts to 250. In general, PCs (those operating a Windows platform) eat more energy than Macs, and desktop models are more power-hungry than laptops. Using a laptop while it is plugged into the mains is marginally more watt-efficient than running it from the battery. Older cathode-ray tube monitors use about twice the power of the newer liquid-crystal-display flat-panels.
The most significant factor in how much electricity your machine is consuming is how hard the processor is working. If you're composing a novel or writing a political manifesto, the computer is ticking over at a leisurely pace, no matter how hard your brain is fermenting. But if you're gaming, or editing your soon-to-be-award-winning film, then the apparatus is going lickety-split and guzzling great gobs of energy (as will be obvious by the sound of disks spinning and fans whirring).
All computers now have a power-management facility.
If you have a PC, access it by clicking on Start, Control Panel and Power Options; if it is a Mac, go to System Preferences and Energy Saver. This allows you to instruct the monitor
and computer individually to "sleep" (Macs) or to go on "standby" (PCs) if inactive for specified periods of time. So, if you step out for a breath of fresh air, your equipment automatically powers down after some minutes, and conserves a good deal of energy. A sleeping machine generally uses six watts or less.
Nevertheless, leaving your electronic friend on standby all day, every day, is wasteful of energy and money: all those little watts join up to form big kilowatts in the course of time.
When you've finished your work or play, turn off the machine (and the modem, printer and everything else).
If you're determined to leave it on, earn some eco brownie points by letting it number-crunch for the planet. Log on to www.bbc.co.uk/sn/hottopics/climatechange, download the BBC Climate Change Experiment and let your machine help out with world's largest climate experiment.