Birnam Designs Blog -- sharing tips, resources, ideas, and more on web development and design

I’m not talking about always closing your database connections, or commenting your code. I’m talking about something a lot more fundamental. Electricity usage.

Our location has four computers, three of which run pretty much 24/7. The biggest machine we have uses about 260 watts, and it trails off from there. So we probably have 650-700 watts of computer running 24 hours a day. I’m no die-hard environmentalist, but that’s significant. On a monthly basis, that tallies up to about 500 Kilowatt/hours on our electricity bill. Ouch! So, today we went out and bought enough CF bulbs — those little Compact Flourescent bulbs where the flourescent tube is in a little coil attached to a normal light bulb base.

We spent about $175 on 39 light bulbs.

But read about how we're saving $1,400!

I’ve been expanding my toolset lately, looking for better ways to increase my efficiency. I first wrote about some of my tool preferences during my Better Web Development series, but with some more tips I wanted to come back to this.

Here are some quick links and reports of some terrific FREE software: