Energy consumption in the office

In this paper we present measurements of energy usage of standard office computing equipment. Using a data trace lasting for all of March 2012 we analyse the energy use of office equipment such as desktop computers, a printer and a fridge. The interest in a more detailed knowledge of the energy usage patterns of these appliances is driven by the desire to manage, and if possible reduce, the energy consumption of computing equipment in a university department. The reason behind this can be financial to reduce electricity costs and/or environmental to reduce the carbon foot print of an office environment. We analyse the data and show simple autoregressive time series models to predict the energy usage of appliances. We also show that it's feasible to accurately approximate the power consumption of a desktop computer using the CPU utilisation information. We describe a future set-up where we plan to monitor the energy usage of a student lab.