PowerPlug introduces the first auto-calibrating PC Power Management system
The PowerPlug PC Power Monitor is a revolutionary hardware device created to measure actual power consumption of PCs and auto-calibrate the entire PowerCloud system to report accurate consumption and savings data.
The PowerPlug PC Power Monitor is a revolutionary hardware device created to measure actual power consumption of PCs and auto-calibrate the entire PowerCloud system to report accurate consumption and savings data.
PowerPlug PC Power Monitor continuously measures PC power consumption and transmits this data to the PowerPlug agent on the host PC.
The PowerCloud agent aggregates the data and sends it to the server that updates the information for all the PCs of the same manufacturer and model – the result is the first and only auto-calibrating system that provides real-life data of PC power consumption, working with actual measured data and not estimated values.
How is PC Power Consumption measured?
Most PCs do not report directly on their power consumption. Therefore, a system that is required to report consumption and savings, such as a PC power management system, must measure the usage of the PC and correlate the usage information with the known power consumption levels for each power state the PC can possibly operate in.
Shutdown/Hibernate
The PC is plugged in but turned off. The PC motherboard, BIOS and (sometimes) network card still consume (very little) power.
Sleep
The PC has been switched to power saving mode. The PC motherboard, BIOS, RAM, and (sometimes) network card are online and consume (little) power.
Idle
The PC is fully operated (on) and is not performing any actual operation (not in use). All the components of the PC, including the CPU, are online and consume power. The computer monitor may be on or off. Power consumption of PCs in idle mode depends on the PC components and can vary from 20 W/hour to more than 100 W/hour.
On
The PC is on and in use by the end-user (or performing background processes). All of the PC’s components are consuming power; the actual power depends on the PC’s components and the tasks they perform (for example, intense mathematical calculations will require more power by the CPU while intense graphic display might require the graphic card, if present, to consume more energy).
What does the PowerPlug PC Power Monitor do?
The PowerPlug PC Power Monitor measures the actual power that the PC consumes every second, stores these measurements and sends them to the PowerCloud PC Agent on the host PC. The PowerCloud PC Agent correlates these measurements with the power states the PC was in, and calculates the actual consumption level of each power state for this particular PC.
The Agent then sends these values to the PowerCloud Server that updates its internal database and ensures that all PCs of the same make and model use the correct power consumption values.
This project has received funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation program under grant agreement No 672278.