Features

Perhaps more surprising is the difference a monitor's brightness can make to power consumption. The values listed here are all for a 50 per cent brightness setting, but at its highest setting the 22in Dell's draw shot up to 44W. At its lowest it plummeted to 20W - a difference of nearly £7 a year between the two settings. If you're running your monitor at full brightness then dropping it to 50 per cent, or at the very least calibrating it properly, can save a fair few quid each year.

As noted in our Desktop PC section, you should ditch the screensavers. Set your monitor to go into standby mode, and you'll save a packet.

Printers

Inkjet (in use/standby) Varies/3W
Laser (in use/standby)Varies/6W

The power consumption of a printer varies wildly between different models. However, one thing is certain: laser printers use more power than inkjets.

When printing from cold, an A4 laser printer can draw up to 700W as it heats the fuser in readiness for bonding powdered toner to printed pages. It then charges the drum and scans it with a laser beam for each print. Thanks to their simpler printing mechanism, inkjets use far less power when printing, consuming anything from 10W to 30W for most A4 colour models. Neither type of printer is active all the time, of course, but standby modes for both are still relatively high, at around 6W for a laser printer and 3W for an inkjet.

Given that there's very little crossover in the

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applications to which laser and inkjet printers are best suited, there's not much point in trying to establish which is the most power-efficient printer. Laser printers are usually much faster at printing text than inkjets, but given their greater power consumption you'll need to be printing an awful lot of pages to make a laser printer cheaper to run.

Apart from buying a model with a low-power standby mode, or simply turning it off when you're not using it, there are no direct steps you can take to cut a printer's power consumption, but there are some roundabout solutions. Laser printers are cheaper to run than inkjets when it comes to toner and ink costs, but in both cases the best way to save money is to print only those documents for which you really need a paper copy. For example, rather than print receipts from online stores, you could install the free Pdf995 PDF creator (www.pdf995.com), then print documents to PDF files and save them to your computer for reference.

Dropping the print resolution won't make much difference to power consumption, but it will make pages quicker to print and make your ink or toner last longer. You probably won't be able to spot any difference in quality between high- and draft-quality text documents. It's also a good idea to enable any ink- or toner-saving modes for the bulk of prints, too.

Finally, enabling a printer's duplex mode to print on both sides of a page will certainly cut down on paper consumption, but since the printer is still printing the same number of pages it won't cut power consumption, and the more convoluted paper path may mean that it actually uses more power.

Network-attached storage

NAS (in use/standby) 41W/1W
Typical cost per year £40

If you have a home network, sharing certain resources can help reduce power consumption. One shared printer will use far less power than different printers connected to multiple computers. Even using network-attached storage (NAS) can make a small difference.