Welcome to the Green Room!

Thanks for the info, it went down very well with the director!  The one comment that came from the penny pinchers (sorry finance people) was this..."87% Averaged Efficiency for E-Family External Adapters" as a comparison what efficiency are the existing D-family external adapters?  Also, I believe the OptiPlex PSUs are 88% efficient, so the same question there, what were they prior to the upgrade?  Obviously if they were 80% efficient there is a 10% increase, if they were 86% they improvement is minimal.

Thanks again

Nikki,

Thanks for posting.  I'm finding out now what info we'll need to get from you so we can remove you from that mailing list.  Hold tight.  I'll be posting something later today.

Thanks!
Todd

I'm trying to do my bit for green IT in UK Government. Getting meaningful figures on current consumption of devices and likely savings is difficult. I see lots of other people's estimates, particularly from manufacturers, but, being rather old and cynical, I want to check them for myself. When I try, with cheap off-the-shelf power monitors for mains supply, I get some strange readings. These are probably due to differences in the power transformers. Some older devices have PSUs with a power factor of 1 (the voltage and current are in phase). Others have switched-mode power supplies where the voltage and current cannot be assumed to be in phase. These are much more energy efficient, especially under low loads, but they confuse my simple power monitoring device and give artificially high readings. I don't want to lapse into AC theory and lots of horrible imaginary numbers (I gave up engineering a long time ago), but can anyone suggest a better way of measuring the real power consumption of devices? How do the nice people at Dell do it?

Hi there

Given Dell's environmental awareness will Michael Dell participate in the Climate conference in CPH this winter ?

Hi Todd, I'm glad to have stumbled across your forum - maybe you can help as all my investigations have drawn a blank so far.  I have a Dell 2007fp monitor and have found what appears to be a flaw in it's internal logic.  When there is no signal going into the monitor, it displays a "no signal" message ad-infinitum and never puts itself to sleep.  This isn't a problem when directly attached to a PC, but as I use two PC's, I need to use a keyboard / video / mouse switch box.  When the PC sends a sleep signal to the monitor, the KVM cuts this off so the monitor spends all it's idle showing this "no signal" message until it is manually switched off.

If you go away from your PC or leave it at night and forget to switch it off, that's quite a lot of wasted power.  I used a power meter to measure this and displaying the "no signal" message uses as much power as when the monitor is in use (about 35 watts in my case).  I have spoken with the manufacturers of the KVM switch and unfortunately there is nothing they can do as they have physically not enable VGA pin 9 which apparantly is the one used to send the standby signal from the PC to the monitor so my only hope is that with your "green" hat on, you can influence someone to put a fix out for this strange behaviour.

So my question is (and assuming this affects many other users of 2007fp monitors), is there a way to upgrade the firmware for instance, so that when the monitor receives no signal, it displays a warning for say 30 seconds and then puts itself into standby mode?

Thanks in advance for any help you can give with this as I've found nothing on line that suggests this is possible to fix.

Mike

Recycling:

On the delivery of a new pc from Dell, I noticed that instead of using polystyrene, it appears that Dell are using what looks like compressed recycled plastic bags and there was a useful stamp on the plastic, indicating that the product could be recycled. I think it had a number 7 on it which suggests that I could put it into my household recycling waste. We recycle plastic bags separately (at the supermarket) as I understand that they jam up the machines at the waste sorting centre for household waste plastics 1-7, but I assume that in the compressed state, that the article can go through household recycling? It may be a question to ask my local waste  collection services.

Anyhow, more to the point was that I wanted to ask if the plastic easy-release fasteners which come with the large Dell cardboard boxes are recyclable? They don't have any indication that they are, which leads me to assume that the plastic doesn't fall into the 1-7 range of plastics which are collected from households. Can Dell shed any light on this? If it is within the 1-7 range could  Dell put the recyclable marker onto the plastic with the relevant number as not all councils collect the full range from 1-7. it might also be an idea to print a notice on the box on what parts of the packaging can be recycled as many people still don't think to recycle.

Todd

This email is bit off topic but I am a professor in Supply Chain Management at Michigan State University.  Along with three other colleagues, I am writing a book on operations management across the supply chain.  A major portion of one chapter is devoted to sustainability.  In it, I have used parts of Dell's report on its commitment to  sustainability.  How do I get permission to use parts of the report (it has been properly cited)? Who do I contact?

Steve

Steve,

I'm checking with our folks now on this.  Hold tight. :)

Todd

Steve,

I just sent you a private message.  Please let me know if you didn't receive it.

Thanks,
Todd

We've recently implemented power management at our site and our trying to gauge our efforts.  Can you direct me to any documents that can show power consumption for a variety of your optiplex machines (620, 740 and 745)?  

Specially I'm interested in these workstations active and standby power draw.  Also if there is something that also shows similar information for your monitors i'd appreciate that as well.  Thanks!

We order 60-80 workstations with monitors and 15-20 Dell laptops per year (with monitors and docking stations).  We receive both VGA and DVI cables of which we only use one.  We also often have extra power cables (reuse the old ones because they are plugged in at an inaccessible place, etc).  Will Dell take these unused cables back, or is there any way we can order the computers without all the extras?  We also end up with stacks of extra CDs.  It's a shame they end up in our trash.