Posts Tagged ‘saving energy’

SWITCH OFF your Mobile Phone and TV at night to save energy!!!

Thursday, June 7th, 2012

TURN OFF YOUR MOBILE PHONE AT NIGHT to SAVE ENERGY and MONEY

We’re constantly being said to reduce energy consupmtion, they sell us new bulbs to save energy, new TVs with energy saving. The newer the computer equipment microwaves or whatever home electrical equipment we buy the more it is said to be saving energy.

So far so good it is true we can reduce energy consumption by producing gadgets which consume less. However there are also another approach to the “green problem” which we never are said about.

It is rather simply instead of saving energy on technology base, we can save energy on physical base. One simple thing to do to save energy with no need to spend money on latest advacement gadgets is to simply make it the old school way.

a -= Learn to switch off your lamps and home equipment whenever its not necessery

If you’re about to go to sleep, you can simply switch off the mobile and use a mechanical clock to wake you up on the morning, this way you have 3 benefits.

1; Less energy will be discharged by the mobile in the time you’re not awake, so you don’t need to charge so frequently the battery and therefore you will draw less energy from the Electrical network hence saving energy.

2; You will not be radiated with a bit less radiation produced by the Mobile phone in order to stay connected to the GSM local located cell.

Though the good this does will not be dramatical it for sure will be better for your health than if the mobile is switched on the whole night.

3; You will not be awakened in morning by some crazy person who just decided to call you early in the morning.
Often this morning unexpected and desired phone calls make you jump off the bed rapidly and hence giving a large dose of stress to your organizm.

-=- Of course switching off the mobile has some disadvantages if you can receive a crucial phone calls during all time of day or night you can’t afford to simply switch off the mobile, this is however not true for most people who work in an OFF-ICE.People working in offices can simply wake up at a scheduled time, get a shower do their morning hygiene and jump to a car or bus to the office so the need for having the mobile switched ON at night is not really needed.

Of course thinking in the same direction, it is logical that switching off the computer earlier when not needed, the wireless home router or the TV is another place from where a huge energy savings can be achieved.

If large amount of people re-learn their energy in-efficient habits to be more energy cautios a HUGE amounts of energy can be saved. This of course can have a positive impact on the monthly energy bills and hence can save you money in monthly expenses.

The TV is surely another big energy draining source, many people have the habit to sleep with a Television switched on. Besides this has a negative impact on the conscious since vast amounts of information are being stored and processed by the conscious and unconscious mind, also the lights emitted from the TV screen prevents the persons body to not have a pieceful rest.

Its rather stupid that companies are constantly ranting on how they improve their products to be energy friendly but they don’t invest even a penny to educate the masses that energy saving does not only depend on how good the technology is produced to save energy but also on how much the people are educated how to use the technology with energy saving in mind.Probably there are plenty of other ways a households can change their habits to save energy. I’ll be glad to hear some other suggestions ,,,

How to disable ACPI (power saving) support in FreeBSD / Disable acpi on BSD kernel boot time

Tuesday, May 15th, 2012

FreeBSD disable ACPI how ACPI Basic works basic diagram

On FreeBSD the default kernel is compiled to support ACPI. Most of the modern PCs has already embedded support for ACPI power saving instructions.
Therefore a default installed FreeBSD is trying to take advantage of this at cases and is trying to save energy.
This is not too useful on servers, because saving energy could have at times a bad impact on server performance if the server is heavy loaded at times and not so loaded at other times of the day.

Besides that on servers saving energy shouldn't be the main motivator but server stability and productivity is. Therefore in my personal view on FreeBSD used on servers it is better to disable complete the ACPI in order to disable CPU fan control to change rotation speeds all the time from low to high rotation cycles and vice versa at times of low / high server load.

Another benefit of removing the ACPI support on a server is this would probably increase the CPU fan life span and possibly prevent the CPU to be severely heated at times.

Moreover, some piece of hardware might have troubles in properly supporting ACPI specifications and thus ACPI could be a reason for unexpected machine hang ups.

With all said I would recommend to anyone willing to use BSD for a server to disable the ACPI (Advanced Configuration and Power Interface), just like I did.

Here is how;

1. Quick review on how ACPI is handled on FreeBSD

acpi support is being handled on FreeBSD by a number of loadable kernel modules, here is a complete list of all the kernel modules dealins with acpi:

freebsd# cd /boot
freebsd# find . -iname '*acpi*.ko'
./kernel/acpi.ko
./kernel/acpi_aiboost.ko
./kernel/acpi_asus.ko
./kernel/acpi_fujitsu.ko
./kernel/acpi_ibm.ko
./kernel/acpi_panasonic.ko
./kernel/acpi_sony.ko
./kernel/acpi_toshiba.ko
./kernel/acpi_video.ko
./kernel/acpi_dock.ko

By default on FreeBSD, if hardware has some support for ACPI the acpi gets activated by acpi.ko kernel module. The specific type of vendors specific ACPI like IBM, ASUS, Fujitsu are controlled by the respective kernel module from the list …

Hence, to control if ACPI is loaded or not on a FreeBSD system with no need to reboot one can use kldload, kldunload module management BSD cmds.

a) Check if acpi is loaded on a BSD

freebsd# kldstatkldstat | grep -i acpi
9 1 0xc9260000 57000 acpi.ko

b) unload kernel enabled ACPI support

freebsd# kldunload acpi

c) Load acpi support (not the case with me but someone might need it, if for instance BSD is running on laptop)

freebsd# kldload acpi

2. Disabling ACPI to load on bootup on BSD

a) In /boot/loader.conf add the following variables:

hint.acpi.0.disabled="1"
hint.p4tcc.0.disabled=1
hint.acpi_throttle.0.disabled=1


b) in /boot/device.hints add:

hint.acpi.0.disabled="1"

c) in /boot/defaults/loader.conf make sure:

##############################################################
### ACPI settings ##########################################
##############################################################
acpi_dsdt_load="NO" # DSDT Overriding
acpi_dsdt_type="acpi_dsdt" # Don't change this
acpi_dsdt_name="/boot/acpi_dsdt.aml"
# Override DSDT in BIOS by this file
acpi_video_load="NO" # Load the ACPI video extension driver

d) disable ACPI thermal monitoring

It is generally a good idea to disable the ACPI thermal monitoring, as many machines hardware does not support it.

To do so in /boot/loader.conf add

debug.acpi.disabled="thermal"

If you want to learn more on on how ACPI is being handled on BDSs check out:

freebsd# man acpi

Other alternative method to permanently wipe out ACPI support is by not compiling ACPI support in the kernel.
If that's the case in /usr/obj/usr/src/sys/GENERIC make sure device acpi is commented, e.g.:

##device acpi