Upgrading the building shell with extra insulation and higher quality windows reduced heating and cooling loads and helped to equalize the thermal demands on the HVAC system. Specific lighting features included the use of daylighting, controlled admission of natural light into a space through windows to reduce or eliminate electric lighting, as well as the use of indirect lighting instead of conventional downlighting. Additional features included low-flow water fixtures and tankless ‘on-demand’ water heating.

Although a few of the initial building characteristics have been modified over the years, the building largely retains its original energy-efficient footprint, and Applied Trust has added new features as well. The photos highlight some of the current energy-efficient aspects of the building.

When we set out to “green up” Applied Trust, we were surprised at how seemingly small things quickly added up. Here are just some of the changes you might find interesting, and hopefully will spark energy-saving ideas for your environment:>

• Set backlight timeouts on phones. Some of the larger Avaya™ display phones that we use have a 4-watt backlight that was on 24 hours a day. A setting in the phone configuration now turns them off after two hours of inactivity, saving an estimated 220 kWh per year.

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Replace inefficient lighting. When the Columbine building was built, great care was taken to install the most efficient lighting available at the time, and a large number of Compact Fluorescent (CFL) sconces were installed. Unfortunately, even these ‘efficient’ sconces used 40 watts each. Replacing them with 3-watt LED sconces not only made them more attractive (see inset), but saves more than 2,900 kWh per year. „„ Replace old signs. Emergency Exit signs are required by law, but old-style units use incandescent bulbs and are yet another device that uses energy 7x24. Each sign that’s replaced with a modern LED unit saves around 100 kWh per year. „„

Before: 40-watt CFL sconce

After:3-watt LED sconce

• Cool down laser printers. Laser printers are a significant energy consumer in most modern office environments. To meet user expectations, most printers keep their fuser warm so that they can quickly print the first page of a print job. On evenings and weekends when users are gone, this is just wasted energy. Configuring one-hour timeouts for ‘sleep’ mode on all of our printers saves us an additional 3,400 kWh per year.

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• Inbound faxes often resulted in printed paper that was looked at for a few seconds and then thrown away. We’ve switched to electronic fax reception, so that all inbound faxes are received via email, dramatically reducing paper and energy waste.

Matt Brutscher evaluating LED lighting tiles in the Applied Trust lab.

As we advise our clients, establishing a baseline and measuring against it is an important part of becoming green. In order to quantify our progress in reducing our energy use, we have installed buildingwide, real-time power consumption monitoring. This system, accessible on our network, allows us to track even the smallest change in energy use. The biggest direct financial impact from our ‘greening’ has been in the area of server infrastructure. We’ve focused on consolidating multiple applications onto a server, and virtualizing the servers themselves. We’ve standardized on VMware® ESX Server software for virtualizing both our Microsoft® Windows® and Linux operating system-based servers, with centralized storage on a SAN. The combination of SAN storage and VMware not only provides efficiencies in power and disk space, but it also has the significant added advantage of making it easy to move virtual servers quickly between physical hardware to improve performance or address maintenance issues due to failed hardware.

Other significant improvements have been made as the result of eco-friendly purchasing decisions. Here are a few that have helped us:

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• For systems furniture, we purchase recycled workstations (‘cubicles’) instead of new workstations to reduce the amount of new materials consumed. We’ve been really impressed with quality and price of the remanufactured Herman Miller® workstations that are available in Denver from The Jones Company (www.jonesoffice.com). „„

We buy only LCD monitors, which are approximately three times more energy efficient than their CRT predecessors. „„ All printer/copier paper is 100% recycled. We were surprised to find that no major office supply chain currently carries 100% recycled paper. After much searching, we found and recommend Boise® Aspen™ 100 paper. The Barking Seal is also printed on 100% recycled paper by a carbon-neutral, wind-powered printing company. These are just a few of the steps we’ve taken to reduce our ecological impact, and as a result, save money. We are proud of our efforts to be more green, and we are committed to continuing our progress in this area. We feel that both our employees and our clients will benefit as a result. We also look forward to helping our clients with their own environments with our Ecoinfrastructure® service offering. Please contact us through our Web site at www.atrust.com or by phone at (303) 245-4545 if we can assist in the greening of your IT Infrastructure!

This power monitor tracks real-time energy consumption.

Click here to view energy-efficient elements of the Columbine Building.