The Right Way

Your Typical LCD

An LCD most likely consumes between 25 and 35 watts, and in California that translates to 90 cents and $1.26 a month respectively. The best thing you can do is adjust your monitor to reduce eye strain, and if you do it right, then you may save some power in the process. In a typical setup, you will be able to adjust the brightness and contrast settings on your monitor, although your video card or chipset may provide you with additional brightness, contrast, and color correction features.

The brightness setting on your LCD determines almost all of its power usage, and by adjusting it, you are almost directly adjusting the power it consumes. However, to minimize eye strain, you should adjust the brightness so that the monitor screen appears just as bright as the rest of the room. Your eyes will quickly strain if there is a substantial difference – such as when you stare at a computer screen at night with the lights off.

Changing the contrast setting on a monitor does very little to affect power usage, but it can greatly reduce eye strain by making it easier for your eyes to distinguish between colors. For example, by increasing the contrast you can make black text on a gray background appear sharper rather than blend in. Contrast changes can also make the screen appear brighter without actually changing its brightness.

Monitors vary in the effect of their contrast settings, but higher contrast generally means a brighter screen with colors blending together. And lower contrast generally means a darker screen with sharper colors. And if your monitor’s settings are too limited to properly adjust the screen, you can also check to see if your graphics driver provides additional options. In Windows, you can right click on the desktop to look for Intel’s “Graphics Properties,” nVidia’s “Control Panel,” or ATI’s “Control Center.”

The Kill-A-Watt Meter

You might be surprised to hear that electronic devices still consume power even when they’re turned off – pretty much anything that plugs into a wall outlet does. This power is referred to as “standby power,” and it’s commonly used to provide some sort of feature – like an infrared receiver listening for a remote, a computer waiting for the ON button to be pressed, or a DVD player displaying the current time. However, this standby load often provides no benefits at all.

Watts are used to measure the rate at which power is consumed, and power usage over time is usually measured (and billed for) in kilowatt hours (kW-h). The cost varies greatly depending on where you live, but the U.S. national average is about 12 cents per kW-h. In California, the average price for residential power is 15 cents and commercial power is one cent cheaper. The average American household (in 2007) consumed 936 kilowatt hours each month.

Although most power is used by appliances such as air conditioning systems and refrigerators, your electronics do consume a significant amount of power. But how much exactly? To answer that question, we’ve prepared the following table showing the typical power usage of computers, monitors, and peripherals.

So if your computer idles at 65 watts, then it would consume at least 46.8 kilowatt hours in a month (30 days) if you never turned it off. And if you live in California where power is 15 cents per kW-h, then you’d be adding $7.02 to your electric bill. Of course the cost will be a lot more depending on how much you use the monitor and peripherals, but at a minimum, your printer, monitor, switch, and phone will add another 14 watts for a total of 79 watts and $8.53.

Let’s say you wanted to lower expenses and you kept your computer and peripherals off at night by turning the power strip off (which stops almost all standby power usage). If your night is eight hours long, this would only save you $2.84 each month. However, if you shut down your computer and didn’t turn off the power strip – thereby losing some power – you would still save $2.27. The power lost at night due to standby power modes is only 57 cents in this case – not even worth considering.

A ''Stupid'' Strip

Even so, a few vendors are marketing “smart” power strips which can shut off some outlets when power usage on a control outlet gets low enough. So if your computer is on the control outlet and it goes to sleep, then the Smart Strip would turn off all power to peripherals on the other outlets. In our typical setup, these peripherals consumed only 14 watts of standby power, and even assuming the computer would be off or asleep for 15 hours each day, the most you could save in a month would be 95 cents. Hardly enough to justify the expense – both of money and energy – of a Smart Strip.

There’s practically no end of shiny new gadgets and software to run on them, and it’s easy to forget about what happens to all this stuff when it becomes obsolete. Much of it is eventually thrown in the trash and will end up in a landfill. This is unfortunate because electronic waste often contains toxic substances such as lead and mercury, which in some landfills may seep into a water source. And it’s another kind of waste altogether when trashed hardware contains valuable metals such as gold and copper that could have been reused.

Sadly, according to the EPA, the United States does not have any comprehensive regulations for the disposal of electronic waste. But while the Federal government is behind the times, California and many other state governments are not. These state regulations differ greatly in their scope and effectiveness, so here we will only talk about the laws in California.

California’s Department of Toxic Substances Control classifies computers, their peripherals, cell phones, monitors, media players, and similar devices as “Electronic Waste” – also known simply as “e-waste.” This category is also a subset of a larger group which the DTSC refers to as “Universal Waste.” And while this name sounds relatively harmless, it’s a horrible misnomer. Universal Waste, according to the DTSC, is hazardous waste that contains toxic substances – such as refrigerators, washers, and other household appliances.

By law in California, it is illegal to throw e-waste in the trash, and many programs have been established to help businesses and consumers recycle their old electronic devices. Even so, finding out how to recycle e-waste can be confusing, and it isn’t always free. Many retailers have either voluntarily or legally been obliged to accept e-waste at their stores, but of course they don’t handle the recycling themselves, and there’s little guarantee that it would be done properly. Plus, these retailers usually accept only specific types of devices – for example, a T-Mobile store will only accept old cell phones.

In our opinion, the best way to recycle is to look for “recycling events” hosted by local e-waste collection companies in collaboration with city governments. At these events, you can usually drop off all kinds of e-waste without any fees. For San Diego, you can find a schedule of local recycling events on SanDiego.gov (More on San Diego’s recycling program). Outside of these events, most collection companies charge fees for some of the devices they accept, and many of them also offer additional services such as document destruction or waste pickups.

If you can’t wait for the next event or there won’t be one in your area, you can find the nearest collector with CalRecycle’s directory. And if you have your doubts about a particular collector or recycler, you can use the California DTSC website to find out what a company is licensed for. There you can see whether the collector does its own recycling or ships it elsewhere. It’s also a good idea to make sure your collection company doesn’t ship waste outside California where regulations for the safe handling of toxic materials is lacking or unenforced.