Going Green
Ever wondered how ACS contributes to UCSD’s sustainability initiative? In addition to offering double-sided printing and an aggressive recycling program in our labs, we also push for less packaging in the computers we purchase. Read more: ACS’s part in Sustainability
If you have any ideas about what more we could be doing, please let us know in the comments!
June 30th, 2008 at 5:57 pm
There is a SUN lab in the basement of the AP&M building with 13 computers that are kept running 24/7 365 days a year. I have never seen anyone login to those computers (you need a special class code to login, not your ucsd email password), and the room is usually used as a study area. The computers are wasting a lot of energy, yet no one uses them.
Other than that, things are energy efficient.
July 16th, 2008 at 5:30 pm
In U409 during the summer there is almost nobody there at all and all of the computers are running full time 24/7. Why leave them on when you can save energy and save costs? I can understand during the school year when there are quite a few on there but now there are very few.
Thanks for listening.
Mark
July 17th, 2008 at 11:08 am
Being an environmentalist myself, I understand your concerns. However there are a variety of factors that require us to leave our labs on 24/7 365 days a year.
At night or when the computers are not being used we push new security updates, patches, virus updates, and also may be removing and pushing new programs. Beyond that we also may be working remotely on solving issues reported by users.
These are difficult things to do during the day as our labs may be reserved for classes or be open for general use. Our goal is to have every computer available for the posted hours open or reserved with as little down time to the users as possible.
We also monitor all the computers so that we can find hardware, software, o/s, and networking problems and hopefully get them resolved as quickly as possible, usually before users would even notice them.
Our computers are on 24 hours a day, however, the monitors are generally left to the default power settings for the monitors to go to sleep after about 20 minutes of no user inactivity.
Turning computers off is really only practical for private labs, offices, and home computers where there is no need to do the previously mentioned stuff. We currently have upwards of 30,000 users using around 2,000 computers which are expected to be up and ready when the users need them.
Whenever we get the chance and funding is available, we do our best to save energy. Such as some labs have motion sensor lighting. We have also replaced a majority of the old CRT monitors and are now using LCD monitors which are energy saver compliant. We also tend to have low wattage power supplies in the computers unless otherwise needed.
Hope this helps answer the question. Feel free to contact me if you need anything else.
Brian Hamilton
ACS Micros
July 18th, 2008 at 4:16 pm
When print jobs are executed, a receipt page is printed every time. The excessive amount of receipts that I find in the wastebins indicates that most people find them useless, although I personally use them for scratch paper.
Will ACS attempt a conversion to online receipts, or a less consuming alternative, such as one receipt per 5 or 10 print jobs?
July 31st, 2008 at 3:37 pm
Disable screen savers from all the computers. It is a waste of energy. A lot of big companies have enacted this and it has saved them millions of dollars. It would be nice to see UCSD do the same.