Save Energy and Go Green on Windows using Edison

Global Warming, increased carbon emissions and and minimizing their impact on nature is the center of attraction these days. PCs can consume account for as much as 10pc of your electricity bill and also add to the carbon emissions to the environment. Few days back we looked at how you can analyze your computer’s power consumption in Linux down to minutes detail and then make it energy efficient. Let’s now look at a windows utility that helps you to conserve energy.

The application is called Edison. Edison allows you to conserve energy by modifying the powers settings of your computer. A nice little app you can download and install free from here. Edison requires .NET framework 2.0 so if you don’t already have it make sure you download the 27MB file. Once installed you are required to register for a free account on developer’s website which I found a bit annoying.

Edison basically manages Windows power settings and allow you to apply different power settings depending upon your needs. However its a bit more than just powers settings. Edison allows you to define the timings during which you generally use your computer then you can have two different sets of power settings for “work time” and “non-work time”. This would allow you to get more aggressive with saving power. If on the other hand you can completely switch off your computer during the “non-work time” then, well nothing like it!

To customize the schedule just hop over to the “Schedule” Tab and enter in the required details to define the work time. As for the actual power savings you can simply move the slider to adjust the power settings. As you move the slider you can see the settings change below the slider. If you are looking for something else you can click on custom button and then key in your values.

Edison also displays your savings by using the current settings. You can customize the rate it uses to calculate the savings by clicking on the underlined rate per kwh and enter your custom rate to display the savings according to the rate in your area.

Overall Edison is a nice little app that gives you greater control over power management and thus would allow you to save some energy and go green. Do you know of some similar apps? How do you do your bit to save energy?