Gadgetell | Tech News, Reviews, and Interesting Things

A study conducted by Australian consumer agency Choice said that video game consoles and plasma flat-screen TVs are the biggest energy users which shoot up consumers power bills.

From among the 16 electronic devices that were tested during the course of the study, both the Sony Playstation 3 and Microsoft Xbox 360 were found to consume the most energy. The study also noted that these game consoles still consume energy even if they are on stand-by mode. Following the Playstation 3 and Microsoft Xbox are devices such as laptops, stereo systems, DVD players and plasma TV’s.

In addition, the report also suggested that consumers switch off their electronic devices from the source and not from the remote control. As shutting it off using the remote control does not totally turn off the power. In fact, when left in power mode for a certain period of time, the study found out that the Playstation 3’s consumption is five times more than the energy consumption of a refrigerator.

Now that you know, we think it would be better to lower our console gaming time or better yet, to save more, we might as well stop using our game consoles. But of course this will be hard to do, especially if you are a hard core gamer. So, we guess the best thing to do then is to reduce the number of hours you use these electronic gadgets.

Read [Yahoo! News]

Mother’s Day is just around the corner, and maybe you’d like to give your mom a digital picture frame.  But here’s something to think about, in the U.S. News & World Report issue for the week ending May 5, 2008, Marianne Lavelle writes,

“Look at just one of the new energy guzzlers: the digital photo frame.  This always-on gadget burns a barely noticeable $9 extra a year into the average household electric bill, says the nonprofit Electric Power Research Institute.  But the impact could be staggering.  EPRI estimates that if every household in America owned one, it would take five medium-sized power plants just to keep those family photo slide shows rolling in the nation’s living rooms.  ‘I call these electronics the sleeping giants in our homes,’ says Thomas Reddoch, EPRI’s director of energy utilization.”

MORE »

Dell’s latest move shows us how just religiously they follow their carbon-neutrality commitment. In case you haven’t heard, Dell’s entire Global Headquarters Campus, a 2.1 million square-foot expanse, is now running off wind-power and converted gas energy from a landfill. This is in cooperation with two companies, namely Waste Management and TXU Energy.

President at Dell Americas, Paul Bell, had this to say about Dell’s remarkable switch from conventional power sources to green power: “Powering an entire campus with green power… is an important step in becoming the greenest technology company on the planet and the right thing to do for our shared earth.” Following it up of course with an answer to a question in everyone’s mind, “How much money does Dell save with this move?” And Bell’s answer to that question is this: “At the same time we’re using green technology to drive operating expense down.” And how low down have they driven their operating expense, you ask? About $2 million annually is the projected amount to be saved in operating costs in Dell’s central Texas campus, where they are already implementing this scheme for quite some time now.

MORE »

As gadget and tech enthusiasts, I’m pretty sure that we all share a common love and respect for an open electrical outlet. We also have the common problem of energy consumption. There have been lots of gadgets released over the last year that have tried to capitalize on the growing green movement, but I personally think this one is one of the more elegant. The Saverclip attaches to your power cables and gives you a visual display of your power consumption. By reading the electromagnetic field around your wires, it can help remind you when to shut things down. It also uses the same electromagnetic field to charge itself; thus preventing the Saverclip from being yet another energy sucker in your house.

Via [Yanko Design]

While everyone is plugging in and going online to read about CES 2007 and future energy-sucking electronics, TreeHugger stays the course with an interview with Sun Microsystem’s Vice-President of Eco-Responsibility, Dave Douglas.

Douglas oversees the environmental friendliness of Sun’s products and internal operations, so according to Douglas, Sun can “...do business in a way that’s good for the environment and for the company’s business at the same time.” That includes producing energy efficient devices while saving the company money.

“Technology isn’t that different from any industry - it will build what customers will pay for,” Douglas said. “What’s unique about the networking and computing space is that a big part of the environmental impact is front and center on our customers’ electric bills. So with rising energy usage and energy prices, going forward you’re going to see a tremendous amount of activity, some of it with real substance and some of it will be marketing hype.”

One program noted in the interview is OpenWork, which makes it possible for Sun’s employees to use networking to their advantage to work from the most convenient location, be it home or an office (or, heck, the beach).

I applaud Sun for having a dedicated, high-ranking corporate officer to keep companies thinking green, purposefully developing more efficient products and allowing forward-thinking programs such as OpenWork into their business plan. In such an Internet-savvy society, it doesn’t make much sense to dedicate so many bricks, so much gas and so many energy-sucking resources to drive to and work from a far-away office when so many people can just as easily, and often more efficiently, work from home. Keep it up, Sun!

Read [TreeHugger] CES Session [Saving Energy with Electronics]