10-year-old tells county how to save $25,000

[coffeeseven]

BLOOMINGTON A fourth-grader has told Monroe County officials that they could save $25,000 a year by turning off computers at night.

Ten-year-old Wynn Brower discovered in a science project for school that by turning off his home's four computers at night, the family would save $1 per day.
Advertisement

Wynn's father, Bill Brower, works in the county's technical services department. He suggested his son expand his project to the county government and describe it to the council.

Wynn demonstrated how he used a device to test the energy use of a laptop and desktop computer, then extrapolated the results to the county's 550 computers. He came up with a savings of $25,000 a year if all computers were turned off at the end of the workday.

http://www.indystar.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20080617/LOCAL/806170375/1310/ARCHIVE

[Kat Kanning]

Cool 

[error]

Very cool. But the bureaucrats aren't likely to actually do it.

[DonnaVanMeter]

wonders what the 10 year old would suggest for the sinking IU library???
as a former resident of Bloomington, Indiana I am shocked that those computers were being left on, for the most part its a pretty much a eco friendly town. In a county with an enforced recycling program I hope those in charge will step up and start turning off those damn computers at night. 

[margomaps]

Depending on the usage of the machines, whether there are any large servers or NAS-type devices, and how much the hourly wage of the employees is, the savings might be far less than $25,000.  It might even end up costing more than the amount of money saved on electricity.  I'll explain.  

I've worked at an engineering firm with medium/large-scale computer labs.  Someone floated the idea of shutting down machines at night and/or weekends to save on electricity.  We even tried it for a while.  The result?  A very significant increase in the number of failing hardware components (especially hard disks in large arrays on servers and NAS's).  Apparently high-use hard disks don't like to be turned of and on very much.  HD's started failing when we'd turn machines back on each morning -- and in particular on Monday mornings for some reason.  Anyway, when one or more of those HD's were on a critical machine like a server or NAS, all the users of the facility were prevented from doing work while the technicians -- at a steep hourly rate -- worked to identify the dead drive(s), replace it/them, get the server back online, and in some cases restore the lost data.  The cost of the hardware itself was usually a few hundred dollars per incident at most, but the cost of the technicians -- and especially the engineers at $50-$100+/hour each -- was huge.

We eventually hypothesized on the apparent correlation between frequent power cycles and failing hardware, did the cost analysis, and stopped shutting our machines down each night.  After that, the hardware failures subsided and the engineers were happy again.

Of course the downtime costs might be far less for a county government than an engineering firm.  But it's something to consider at any rate.

Nevertheless, kudos to this kid and his dad for thinking about cutting wasteful habits.  I'm one of those cheap SOB's who chides family members for leaving lights on in unattended rooms, installs (and uses!) dimmer switches on the incandescent fixtures, etc.  It just makes good sense on an individual level.  Except in the winter time, when the heat from the incandescents is useful in heating the house a bit.  

[slim]

Depending on the usage of the machines, whether there are any large servers or NAS-type devices, and how much the hourly wage of the employees is, the savings might be far less than $25,000.  It might even end up costing more than the amount of money saved on electricity.  I'll explain.   

I've worked at an engineering firm with medium/large-scale computer labs.  Someone floated the idea of shutting down machines at night and/or weekends to save on electricity.  We even tried it for a while.  The result?  A very significant increase in the number of failing hardware components (especially hard disks in large arrays on servers and NAS's).  Apparently high-use hard disks don't like to be turned of and on very much.  HD's started failing when we'd turn machines back on each morning -- and in particular on Monday mornings for some reason.  Anyway, when one or more of those HD's were on a critical machine like a server or NAS, all the users of the facility were prevented from doing work while the technicians -- at a steep hourly rate -- worked to identify the dead drive(s), replace it/them, get the server back online, and in some cases restore the lost data.  The cost of the hardware itself was usually a few hundred dollars per incident at most, but the cost of the technicians -- and especially the engineers at $50-$100+/hour each -- was huge.

We eventually hypothesized on the apparent correlation between frequent power cycles and failing hardware, did the cost analysis, and stopped shutting our machines down each night.  After that, the hardware failures subsided and the engineers were happy again.

Of course the downtime costs might be far less for a county government than an engineering firm.  But it's something to consider at any rate.

Nevertheless, kudos to this kid and his dad for thinking about cutting wasteful habits.  I'm one of those cheap SOB's who chides family members for leaving lights on in unattended rooms, installs (and uses!) dimmer switches on the incandescent fixtures, etc.  It just makes good sense on an individual level.  Except in the winter time, when the heat from the incandescents is useful in heating the house a bit.   

Margo I think they are talking about desktop PC's which are much different then servers and other network infrastructure. In most places servers and network devices should be left on all the time, this is because on the off hours is when most backup cycles take place so the servers and switches are being used to transfer that data to a backup media (i.e tape). Most desktops should be shut down to save on electricity unless the IT staff is deploying new software and patches. At the place I work we have a policy that all users shut PC's down at night except for Thursday nights when everyone leaves the PC's on to download the new patches and so that we can do some administrative tasks.

For servers with a failed hard drive if the server was built with RAID this is normally nothing to worry about. With RAID the server will run with a failed drive it may be a bit slower then normal and all you would need to do is get the new drive replace it with the failed drive and the RAID can be configured to automatically rebuild the drive. During my 8 years as a System Administrator I never had to restore data from a backup tape due to a hard drive failure, a few extra dollars when buying a server is a great investment when figuring out the cost of not having 10, 15, or 10,000 people not able to perform their work. The only times I had a server that was unavailable during the work day was due to software issues for example a handful of times with the corporate Database server, and once with the corporate e-mail server all these problems were because software did not work as it was designed.

[margomaps]

Margo I think they are talking about desktop PC's which are much different then servers and other network infrastructure. In most places servers and network devices should be left on all the time, this is because on the off hours is when most backup cycles take place so the servers and switches are being used to transfer that data to a backup media (i.e tape). Most desktops should be shut down to save on electricity unless the IT staff is deploying new software and patches. At the place I work we have a policy that all users shut PC's down at night except for Thursday nights when everyone leaves the PC's on to download the new patches and so that we can do some administrative tasks.

Yep, I just threw that out there as an FYI.  The risk is probably quite low when the machines we're talking about are relatively "dumb" clients on a network.

For servers with a failed hard drive if the server was built with RAID this is normally nothing to worry about. With RAID the server will run with a failed drive it may be a bit slower then normal and all you would need to do is get the new drive replace it with the failed drive and the RAID can be configured to automatically rebuild the drive. During my 8 years as a System Administrator I never had to restore data from a backup tape due to a hard drive failure, a few extra dollars when buying a server is a great investment when figuring out the cost of not having 10, 15, or 10,000 people not able to perform their work. The only times I had a server that was unavailable during the work day was due to software issues for example a handful of times with the corporate Database server, and once with the corporate e-mail server all these problems were because software did not work as it was designed.

RAID certainly has been a life saver for failing HD's, no doubt.  I'm surprised at your lack of observed HD failures though.  Maybe it's just the nature of scientific/engineering usage patterns (lots of heavy and repeated data reads and writes), but at the engineering company HD failures were pretty common.  At least one or two per month in a facility with approximately 100 client machines, and maybe 10 servers and 2-3 NAS's.

All it took was one or two days where something went wrong half the day, and you're looking at a big expense for the downtime.  Averaging maybe $75 per engineer per hour, a 4 hour downtime meant losing up to $30k in salary expenses alone, plus lack of productivity (and additional expense for the technicians).

[KBCraig]

PCs that go into a proper "sleep" cycle with a dark monitor (no screen savers) use almost no electricity. Powering them off saves such a miniscule amount of electricity that it's only worth it for someone running a solar and battery system.

[Puke]

Shut down the gov't and save a whole shit-load of money!

[coffeeseven]

Shut down the gov't and save a whole shit-load of money!

[Free libertarian]

Shut down the gov't and save a whole shit-load of money!

With the devaluing of the dollar, a shitload is now worth what a pant load was just a few years ago.

[John Edward Mercier]

If the government was shut down... devaluation of the USD wouldn't be a problem. It would be highly decorative toilet paper.