How do you tackle energy concerns?

[Disease]

We have a constant problem here with staff failing to trn off equipment at the end of each day when they leave work. This concerns the head greatly and asked me to find out what other schools do to tackle the problem apart from constant reminders?

 

Any suggstions or pointers on how your school manages to tackle dirty energy wasters is much appreciated

[enjay]

1. We use BeyondExec to automatically turn the PCs off - classroom PCs just after the end of the school day, staff ones around 6pm.

2. PowerOut (from Visionsoft, who I think have since gone bust) to control power management settings on the PCs, so screens off not screensavers, disks stop spinning etc. Will experiment with hibernating the PCs at some point.

3. Projectors are set with idle time-outs so they turn off after 30 minutes of inactivity (shorter than that caused problems for people who leave resources up for the class to work on all lesson)

4. Printers run on the lowest energy setting which is convenient

5. New equipment is bought with energy consumption in mind

[alan-d]

Various ways exist but we use

 

Energy Save EZ GPO : ENERGY STAR which you just have in your AD.

 

We use wol to shut down and start up PCs during the working week.

 

Educating users is the real pain!

[fafster]

We use the shutdown policy built into ABControl. Anything still on at half five will have a warning to say the system is being shut down, and they have thirty seconds to cancel it.

[CESIL]

I use shutdown as scheduled task from server at 6pm each day to turn all curriculum computers off.

 

Other than that after 5 years trying to educate the users I have decided to stop bashing my head against that particular wall...at least I don't have to pay the bill...oh except I do of course throught the tax I pay on my laughably low salary...

[dhicks]

We have a constant problem here with staff failing to trn off equipment at the end of each day when they leave work.

 

Schedualed task to shut down PCs at 8pm, plus a bunch of E-On power plugs that switch of monitors / printers / etc when the PC is switched off:

 

e-on, Consumer Electronics, Computing, Books, Comics Magazines items at low prices on eBay.co.uk

 

--

David Hicks

[enjay]

I've thought about those plugs, but then realised how long it would take to actually save money with them. Definitely worth considering timer switches on higher consumption equipment though - laser printers, even on power save, can use daft amounts of electricity, I was amazed when I saw that one of ours idles at around 100W (the same printer also hit 1KW when printing!). Buy an energy meter (about £20) and plug it into a few things to see which the real culprits are.

[pete]

I worked through the government-provided docs linked in this post: http://www.edugeek.net/forums/comments-suggestions/38978-green.html#post362585 to see where we were with targets, where we could improve and where it wasn't sensible to save energy (saving energy had sufficiently negative effect on T&L we'd rather spend the money).

 

I proactively (head is very green, knew it would become a point of discussion) provided a report showing where we were, where we could improve and where the ideas didn't apply to us.

 

The linked docs cater for everything from a one-person office to a byzantine .gov data centre where no-one knows what's in the racks.

 

End result is we're pretty damn green already, just the info wasn't readily available to back this up.

Edited October 15, 2009 by pete

[cookie_monster]

We use PSShutdown and schedule it to run from a server via batch files at the end of each day.

[JJonas]

We use shutdownatron to turn off all pcs at then end of the day

We no longer turn on the pcs in the morning

I have adjusted the air conditioning to go off after 60 minutes of use

[rvdmast]

2 years ago i made all our staff a simple calculation:

-An idle computer (not in sleep or hibernate) still uses 80W on average (i measured this)

-If we assume the last staff leaves at six PM and the first staff come in at seven AM that

results in 13 hrs of idle time.

-Of our ~300 workstations, about 30% was left on at night, equals 90 workstations.

80W * 90 = 7200W (7,2 kW)

7200 * 13 = 93600Wh or 93,6 kWh wasted each night.

At 0,25 € per kWh that makes €23,40 wasted each night, or €702 each month.

 

I had no trouble getting backup from management and

I then proceeded to implement EZgpo and scheduled shutdown scripts at 7PM. which

b.t.w. i recently replaced with Shutdownerton.

 

Oh and to accomodate those complaining about long startup times in the morning we

switch on all PC's at 6AM (using WakeOnLAN) and at the same time make them

install any Windows Updates and reboot if required through a script. Thus the

computers are on and ready for login when the first staff come in at seven.

Edited October 16, 2009 by rvdmast

[mjs_mjs]

how much money did you save the school overall???

[enjay]

@rvdmast - that was the calculation I did here as well, although I went a step further and looked at what the PCs do when idle, i.e. why are the hard disks spinning, why is the screen using ~30W to show the school name on a screensaver? The temperate difference in our IT Suites after making these changes was quite noticeable; I don't see the electricity bills, but I'm confident the changes show up there too.

[cookie_monster]

I haven't used EZ GPO is this something that can be achieved with group policy preferences now or does it do more?

[7andY]

Beyondexec via scripts run at various times after 15:30.

 

Good thing about Beyondexec is that you can set a switch so that it will only shut down those PCs that are logged off, so that there is no 'nag' screen for those still using them. The final script of the day forces a logoff before shutting down - surprising how many are left logged on when people go home - or is it??

[enjay]

I had some notes on that "only if logged in" thing, but now can't find them - could you remind me how it is done please.

 

Also, has anyone found a way to shutdown PCs which are locked?

[gill]

Set the pcs to shut down at 6pm.

 

Create an eco group with lots of student members and let them nag/remind staff to power things down at the end of lessons/school day.

 

Before you know it the kids will have teachers saving energy and you won't have to do a thing!

[elsiegee40]

Set the pcs to shut down at 6pm.

 

Create an eco group with lots of student members and let them nag/remind staff to power things down at the end of lessons/school day.

 

Before you know it the kids will have teachers saving energy and you won't have to do a thing!

 

Our "Eco Monitors" have been a great success. Originally set up to get lights switched off, they have increased their remit themselves... nothing like kids being empowered to nag a teacher!

 

Every class from reception to year 6 has a badge (made ourselves using a badge kit - primary kids like badges) and each child takes their turn to be Eco Monitor for the week. Their job is to be last in line to leave a classroom and to ensure the lights are turned off. The older ones are turning off whiteboards and PCs now too With the younger ones, it seems the Eco Monitors are reminding the teachers they are supposed to be doing this.

[enjay]

"Eco Monitors" is a wonderful idea in a Primary, not sure it would fly in Secondary, partly because of the fact that they're moving rooms all the time.

[gshaw]

We used to have a scheduled task doing shutdowns but I disabled it after the Conficker scares (used the same scheduler service)

 

Now looking at using Shutdownertron, seems better than the EZGPO at doing the same task

[meastaugh1]

We used to have a scheduled task doing shutdowns but I disabled it after the Conficker scares (used the same scheduler service)

 

Now looking at using Shutdownertron, seems better than the EZGPO at doing the same task

 

I did have a go with Shutdownertron which is a nice start at a de-centralised solution, but wasn't mature/comprehensive enough a solution for me.

 

I run beyondexe in a few shutdown scripts. We start shutting down all idle computers (ie not logged on) from 3.15, and repeat that schedule every 15 mins so that as users logoff, the computer will be shutdown shortly afterwards. Then at 18:00 we issue a shutdown regardless of whether users are logged on. All initiated shutdowns have a wait period of about 15 mins, and users are able to abort them.