A Green Profile
It’d be difficult for anyone to have missed out on the controversy surrounding the climate over the last decade. There are indications of unexpected and “unnatural” change; of the environment developing in a distinctly negative direction.
Some agree that change is happening, but disagree that it is due to humans; some claim it has not changed more than what is entirely normal, and quite a few are of the opinion that our use of fossile fuel over the last couple of hundred years are the direct cause of environmental damage seen today.
It is far beyond the scope and competence of Greytower to decide which is and isn’t correct — but regardless of science and politics one fact remain: there is no point in wasting what all can agree is a limited treasure — our natural resources.
For this reason, we’re implementing a change or two. First, all invoices sent from Greytower will be sent in PDF form. If you require a paper version, we’ll provide one, of course, but if you can avoid it, please do?
We are doing the same to our user manuals. As of early July 2011 we’ll only produce printed documentation on demand. Instead we’ll have HTML, PDF, EPUB and Kindle versions available for download. Don’t worry, we’ll take great care in making them both accessible and well–formatted within the limitations of e–book typography. If you need a different format, contact us! We’ll see what we can do.
Contracts will, for legal reasons beyond our control, still be produced on paper.
Trees, in our view, are too precious a commodity to be wasted. We’ll do our little bit to ensure they are used for the most important of purposes.
Secondly, when refreshing our hardware we aim for L–marked CPUs, reducing the amount of electricity spent per clock–cycle. Our terminals are all monitored for power consumption, and hardware switches installed so that during the warm months we can turn monitors, switches and chargers entirely off during non work hours. A typical workbench now pull approximately 65W of effect; 150W when under heavy use. New solid–state disks will be installed so that we can hibernate the machines quickly and safely — cutting down idle usage even further.
During the cold months — which are quite a few in Sweden — the surplus heat from all our systems are using to keep the office warm. Extra cooling is only required during the most extreme heat spells, and so our ACC systems are switched off at all other times.
Third, the office is being measured for a new heating system based on ground–warmth; a sizeable investment which we believe will pay off in the long run. Using an near maintenance–free heat pump, we can reduce electricity requirements with close to 70%.