Reducing power consumption of electronics

One of our network switches stopped working.  While looking for replacements, I decided to look for a switch that would be more energy-efficient than the existing one.  I was very interested in D-Link's Green line of products. I bought the DSG-1024D 24-port network switch.  I figured that I would be able to replace several switches with a single energy-efficient switch.

The D-Link Green series has several ways that it saves power:

• It powers down port where it detects an idle link status.


• The switch can detect the cable length of Gigabit Ethernet run, and will use less power for shorter runs.

Before I replaced the switch, I measured the combined energy usages of the switches and did the same after replacing the old ones with the new switch.  By just replacing the two older switches, with the single new switch I saw some power savings.  Since I have other switches that are always on, I decided to replace those as well.

Once I replaced these switches, I saw a savings of 8 watts.
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