A Simple Way to Save Money & Reduce CO2 Emissions

How would you like to do something about global warming, to save some money and to have some fun while doing it? Sounds too good to be true? Well, it isn't. A while back I stumbled across a piece of free software called Edison that allows you to do all of the above.

Edison offers a painless way to manage your computer's power consumption. If you are like me, your computer is always on drinking up power whether or not you are actually using it. Of course, the reason I leave my computer on is that it is a hassle to wait five minutes for thing to boot up every time I need to use it.  Enter Edison.

Once you install the program, you can schedule work and non-work time, and set different power saving options for each of those times. You can also set a different schedule for each day of the week. For example, I scheduled my "work week" to be 7 days a week, from 7 AM to 12:00 AM. During that time, I have instructed Edison to power off my screen after 5 minutes of non-use, to power off my hard drive after 5 minutes of non-use and to suspend the computer after it goes un-used for 1 hour.  When suspended the computer goes into sleep mode, from which it recovers within seconds. At night time, I set even more aggressive power saving rules.

Here is where the fun part starts: Edison calculates your annual money, electricity and CO2 emissions savings, based on the power saving rules you have selected. Edison tells me that my settings will result in savings of $56 annually and that my CO2 emissions will be reduced by 865 pounds a year!

Talk about an easy way to make an impact on the environment and on my bank account.

I highly recommend Edison. You can download it free of charge here.