The managers and employees at Pitney Bowes believe in a good night’s sleep—for their computers. The mail and document management solutions company has implemented a program for putting the 10,500 computer monitors to “sleep” when workers leave their offices for the night. Company officials estimate the move will save more than $160,000 a year on energy bills and conserve enough energy to power about 2,300 U.S. homes for a month. By Michael Gilbert and Brian Bonacci
To implement its monitor power management plan, Pitney Bowes worked with
Energy Star, the U.S. EPA’s voluntary program to promote pollution prevention through energy efficiency. Relatively minor adjustments to computer network settings allow monitors to go into low-power “sleep” mode after a specified period of inactivity and awaken in seconds when the keyboard is touched or the mouse moved. About 45% of the nation’s computers are not enabled for sleep mode, costing U.S. business and organizations $900 million a year, according to Energy Star.
Putting Pitney Bowes to Sleep
When activating monitor power management company-wide, Pitney Bowes was met with a number of challenges. About 3,300 desktop workstations in their Connecticut facilities used Microsoft Windows NT, the only Microsoft Windows operating system that does not support the power management functions of Energy Star-compliant monitors. In past years, energy usage on these machines was controlled with manually installed “Monitor Misers,” a hardware device that powers down inactive monitors. The other 7,200 workstations throughout Pitney Bowes’ offices employed Microsoft Windows 95 or 98 operating systems, but previous efforts to enable monitor power management varied from office to office.
The Pitney Bowes IT staff planned to migrate all 10,500 computers nationwide from Windows 95, 98 and NT to Windows 2000, and the company wanted a uniform power management program for all of its offices.
Questions arose about the most effective way to implement power management company-wide. Would the IT staff have to manually enable power management on each computer? Could the company rely on each individual computer user to manually enable power management? Should Pitney Bowes attempt to extend the Monitor Miser program to all 10,500 computers?
To help Pitney Bowes work through these challenges, a technical team of Energy Star advisers presented the IT staff with the following options.
EZ Save software – This free, centrally administered software, developed and funded by the Department of Energy and the Environmental Protection Agency, gives a network administrator the ability to:
- Report the monitor power management settings of each computer on a network;
- Set appropriate monitor power management settings for workstations; and
- Provide the end user control over monitor power management implementation.
EZ Wizard software – This file can be placed on the energy manager’s web page. End-users simply click on the program and their computers are automatically enabled for monitor power management.
Windows 2000 Replication – If machines are replicated from a template image during the transition to Windows 2000, enabling the monitor power management setting in the template machine will ensure that all new Windows 2000 machines are enabled for monitor power management.
After the presentation, the Pitney Bowes IT staff discussed the different options, and the obvious choice was replicating via Windows 2000.
With the help of a third-party desktop management tool, Pitney Bowes completed the Windows 2000 migration and monitor power management was activated on all of its 10,500 computers in the beginning of 2002. The incremental effort to modify the template image to include monitor power management took less than one day of IT staff time.
Building on the successes in its U.S. facilities, Pitney Bowes plans to expand the monitor power management program to 3,200 computers at international locations.
The Monitor Misers already in place at Connecticut facilities were no longer needed, and Pitney Bowes plans to donate them to non-profit organizations that remain on Windows NT.
With power management, the company expects to save about 2 million kWh in energy annually. And, because of the associated reduction in carbon dioxide emissions at its local utility, Pitney Bowes is helping the environment by the equivalent of planting about 450 acres of trees annually.
It turns out that a phone call to Energy Star resulted in tremendous savings for Pitney Bowes, and that will help everyone at the company sleep a little better at night.
Michael Gilbert is program manager for energy and the environment for Pitney Bowes. Brian Bonacci is Pitney Bowes’ director of end-user computing services.
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