Remove all unnecessary peripherals from home servers.

Our home has a shared file server that we all use. It was an older PC that got “recycled” into a new use, but later, when I checked it out with my Kill-A-Watt energy usage meter, I realized it was sucking down a lot of juice. When I investigated further, I realized that there were a lot of things inside the unit that weren’t really necessary.

Thus, I simply removed an old graphics accelerator card, an old DVD-R drive, and an old CD-RW drive from it and observed that the energy use of the unit went down about seven watts. Over the course of a year, since this machine would be in use nonstop, that choice eliminated 62 kilowatt hours of usage, saving me $6.20 per year. Since the server is on a monitor and keyboard switch and is only used for, well, file serving, I also don’t need that equipment for it, either.