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A survey of employees' home and workplace energy use has
revealed that office equipment eats up energy at twice the
rate of home equipment.
The in-depth study was conducted by Sun
Microsystems on a selection of its own employees,
who were equipped with a kilowatt-hour monitor that measures
electricity consumption.
Participants averaged a power consumption of 64W per hour
at home, compared with 130W per hour at a Sun Microsystems'
office.
The results suggest that cutting down commuting by 2.5 days
per week could reduce an employee's energy consumption by
the equivalent of 5,400Kwh a year.
Employees who cut out their daily journey to a Sun office
also reduced their carbon footprints. Commuting accounted
for more than 98 per cent of employee work-related carbon
footprints.
"We found that the energy used by working in the office
was about twice as much as that used when working from home,
which was a significant difference" - said Kristi McGee,
senior director for Sun's Open Work services group. "But
we also found that the energy consumption used in the commute
to work had a huge impact."
Sun has long been a pioneer in promoting the benefits of
teleworking through its Open Work programme. More than half
of its workforce regularly work from home or in one of the
company's flexible offices.
The vendor operates a system known as 'hoteling' -
where employees reserve office space at any Sun location and
log-on to the resident Sun Ray machine when they choose to
work on-site.
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