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Corporate screen saver costs US$122,000

Yep cost per year for screen saver running 24 hrs a day 365 days a year was US$122,000.

Our organisation was looking for cost savings and a new corporate screen saver came out at about the same time. There was some comment about how much it must have cost, even though it looked good and everyone felt part of the team now they had it.

I got to thinking, how much is it actually costing for everyone in our division, about 800 people, to run this new screen saver. So I opened up a power cord, got out the volt meter and measured 10 or 12 monitors and 10 or 12 different PCs to find out how much power they were using. It took a few lunch times worth of work but by the end of the week I had some numbers.

I was looking to contibute something to our whole organisation, about 8000 people at the time so I was hoping for multiplier effects.
What I found was very interesting but did require some assumptions due to our division and the organisation being spread all round the globe.

My hypothesis was that screen brightness and power options on the PC could provide cost savings through reduced power bills.
I did some user research and found that reducing screen brightness from 100% to 81% most staff members couldn't tell the difference.

What did I find
- reducing the screen brightness to 81% and turning off computers when staff were on leave could save about US$48,000 per year for our division of 800 staff

- reducing the screen brightness to 81% , turning off computers when staff were on leave and implementing power options to turn off the screen and the computer could save about US$122,000 per year for our division of 800 staff.

Conclusion
I measured actual PCs and tested with actual users across 10s of machines / monitors and people. Beyond that I made assumptions about the cost of electricity, the number of PCs per person and the number of screens per person.
Despite that there are large dollar savings to be had in managing the power settings and brightness of your organisations computers. Especially at the enterprise level.

If you'd like a copy of the spreadsheet just let me know.
Here is a screen shot of the numbers

Screen capture of 2 FTE savings from using power options and 81% screen brightness



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