How in the Tech

Using Granola to reduce the cost of running your PC

By Adam Myers ⋅ June 14, 2010 ⋅ Tags: Linux, Optimization, Windows

Saving energy isn’t just the popular thing to do, it’s right thing to do. Whether you believe in the impact of society on global warming or not, you probably are still receptive to saving a few dollars on your electricity bill? All modern PCs behave quite nicely with Windows built-in power management features such as Stand By and Hibernate. While hibernate might be a tougher conversion to make due to it’s slower by design resume feature, stand-by is something the majority of us should use. Unless your PC is actually doing something while you are away from it, a properly functioning PC utilizing stand by can resume to a fully working state in mere seconds. Surely that is sufficient to 90% of the PC users out there?

Utilizing the built-in power management functionality on your PC is an easy way to save money – a PC running 24/7 in my area costs roughly $10-15 a month. While you won’t retire early on these savings it is essentially free money in my opinion. For those of you that care a bit more about the environment or are even more miserly, their exists a piece of software that may speak to you.

Granola is an energy saving software that works on both Windows and Linux. Using analysis and under-lying algorithms, Granola can further reduce your power consumption on your PC by focusing almost exclusively on the CPU. While all modern processors feature some sort of built-in energy management, either throttling down the clock cycles or core voltage and times of minimal use, they’re results are conservative at best. Granola can further squeeze out a few more pennies on the dollar while sitting quietly in the background. The effect is essentially transparent after the initial splash screen in my experience.

The main interface of Granola consists of many interesting statistics and some tangible analogies to the savings you’ve incurred. For example, while a number such as 50 kWh saved over the course of the year means little to most, Granola will instead present the information in how many hours you could run an air conditioner or refrigerator. You will also get a cost savings tracked throughout the use of the software assuming you provide your electricity costs in the options panel. It’s really a clever tactic that attracted the attention of someone like myself.

Granola is a free download and works on most Windows (and Linux) systems including Windows 7.

Download Granola