Indianapolis Museum of Art Blog

No, sorry… we’re not building a time machine. But, last week at the monthly All-Staff meeting, IMA employees were treated to a sneak peek of a monitoring project that the MIS department has in the works. It’s similar to what I wrote about in an earlier post, but on a bigger scale (by the way, that Eco-button went glitchy on me). In the IMA machine room, we have rack-mounted servers that host a variety of applications used by staff at the museum. There’s also a decent 16 terabytes (1TB = 1024GB) of disk storage in there.

One of the racks in our machine room

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One might say that I’ve been addicted to efficiency for quite a while. Even before learning about the need to conserve fuel and reduce CO₂ emissions, I would organize my activities and errands so that I could take care of them in as few excursions as possible. The logistics of ordering these tasks was almost an odd form of entertainment for a mind trained by late nights playing board games in college (computer science and engineering may have had some effect as well). These days, however, my mind has turned to other – perhaps more practical – conservation decisions involving hybrid cars, rain barrels, and energy efficiency.

This device monitors voltage, power, and cost

In today’s post I would like to share some investigations that I have done with a couple of cool energy efficiency tools. Perhaps you’ve heard of vampire energy. I’ve suspected that some of my home appliances are vampires, and a few weeks ago I decided to start doing some investigation of my own by purchasing a consumer-grade energy meter to measure the amount of energy that various electronics around my house consume. I haven’t done much analysis yet, but I have found that during normal use over a month, my entertainment center uses 75.04kWh and costs me $10.20 in electricity. This amounts to $122.40 over the course of a year. When everything is in standby, these undead electronics suck down 36kWh in a month (I need to run this test with the DVR on another outlet). Leaving the system in standby for a year would still cost me about $60.
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