No really, it seems innocent enough, but do you really know what it's doing while you're not looking? My copier is fancy, fancy, fancy. It will make me copies, double sided if I want, I can feed documents in from the top, or on the glass the old fashioned way. It will scan (in color!) and email or ftp the file wherever my little heart desires. But while I'm not watching, what is it doing with all of its brainpower?
Or more to the point--how much Energy is it using while I am not using it? How much energy does it take to keep all of that brainpower going?
Time to find out. I want to know how much (if any) energy I can save by turning my copier off while I'm not using it. Lots of people have asked similar questions and posted their answers all over the web. However, most of them have been concerned with energy efficiency, not the amount it didn't use because it was turned off. I have no way to meter just the electricity my copier uses. Heck, my community has no electrical meters on any of the buildings even. But with Google, I was able to find the manufacture's specifications for my copier. If I only turn the copier on when I need it, and turn it back off again when I don't, and by keeping track of how long that is each time, I'll be able to tell (with some assumptions) how much energy the copier is using. I can compare that to how much energy it would have used (again with some assumptions) if I had just left it on all the time. Collecting this data will be simple and old fashioned--a clipboard and a pencil next to the copier. Once I have my info, a little math and I'll know!
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