Ask the expert

Ask the Expert

Have questions about how best to save energy in your home? Well, Ask the Expert! Here you can find the energy efficiency advice you need on ENERGY STAR certified products and home improvement projects by viewing articles, videos and more created by the experts at EPA’s ENERGY STAR program.

December 03, 2020
Computer technicians working in a server room.

How to Measure Server Efficiency with SERT

SERT™ stands for Server Efficiency Rating Tool and it was developed by SPEC® in collaboration with the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency. It collects measurements and uses an accompanying efficiency metric to assess computer server energy efficiency for ENERGY STAR certification. The tool is now used by the ENERGY STAR program and the EU Lot 9 EcoDesign regulation, as well as Japan’s Top Runner program for computer servers, as a harmonized way to evaluate computer server efficiency data in different geographies across the globe.  

November 05, 2020
Open office space with people working at their stations.

How to Optimize Power Management Settings for Savings

Power management in a computer and/or monitor allows the product to enter low power modes when not in use, saving significant energy and drastically increasing battery life in portable devices. It is an important energy-saving feature that is required to be enabled as-shipped in all ENERGY STAR certified notebook and desktop computers as well as computer monitors.  

November 05, 2020
Man running tests on a server in a data center.

How to Save Idle Energy in Computer Servers

How often is your computer server in a low or zero energy utilization state? The answer may surprise you. On average, utilization is only about 10%-15%. Business patterns vary throughout the day, week, month, and/or year, but long periods of inactivity are typically unavoidable.  

Server utilization is highly dependent on workload as well as the level of virtualization achieved on a group of computer servers, ranging anywhere from 5% to 30% on average in an enterprise environment. Products in a cloud service environment can hit higher utilizations.  

November 05, 2020
A row of enclosed servers in a data center.

How to Do More with Less Using Deployed Power Analysis

It’s obvious that computer servers use a lot of energy within the data center. But did you know you can optimize your data center to help increase its performance with fewer servers by calculating how much work your servers can perform for a given amount of energy input, in aggregate?