Frequently Asked Questions
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What is Care Taker?
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Care Taker is an energy usage monitoring tool which regulates your IT systems to help reduce energy wastage, CO2 emissions, and energy costs via the utilisation of set policies. Specifically aimed at creating a greener working environment, Care Taker will record all PC activity types from Active to Offline recording the energy consumption and when energy policies were applied to help reduce carbon dioxide emissions. This data can then be retrieved and viewed through the Reporting Module component of the software in a graphical representation form.
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What operating systems does Care Taker support?
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Currently Care Taker is supported on Windows XP (Service Pack 2 & Service Pack 3), Windows Vista, Windows 7 and even on all major distributions of Linux. Other operating systems are currently being worked on such as MacOS and UNIX.
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How do I install Care Taker?
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Care Taker would ideally be installed on a PC where the owner has access to the entire network infrastructure, such as the domain administrator. From there the Service Management Console can be used to locate all PC’s on the target network, and then deploy the Care Taker Manager to all computers on that network.
IT administrators can either force systems to restart upon installation or allow a silent install without restarting and wait for the system to restart naturally at a later time.
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How can I enforce an enterprise-wide policy to reduce energy wastage across all PC's?
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Care Taker provides the client with the ability to set policies in line with their working needs. The client can dictate how long a PC can be inactive before enforcing power-saving policies and also what action the PC should take, e.g. Standby, Hibernate, Shut down. Tthe period of inactive time and the action taken will determine how much energy will be saved.
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Is Care Taker intrusive to the user?
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Care Taker is designed to be non-intrusive software which is completely transparent to users in a typical working environment.
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How does Care Taker support Display Screen Equipment (DSE) HSE policies?
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With the principal objective of promoting health and safety at work across all EU member states, the 1993 Working Time Directive set a maximum 48 hour maximum working week and stipulated rest and leave periods.
Within the legislation, it is suggested that employees should be allowed short frequent breaks away from their computer during long periods of work. Ideally 5-10 minutes for every 60 minutes continuous work. Care Taker can be configured to implement break schedules into an employee’s working day. For instance, if an employee works over a continuous 60 minute period, Care Taker will display a timer on screen counting down the time until the computer goes into standby mode encouraging the user to take a short break. The user can accept the break by leaving their computer to go into standby mode automatically, or override this option and decline the break by continuing to work.
Graphs produced by Care Taker detail the number and length of breaks taken and can be printed out for employees and managers to sign, in acknowledgement of the information recorded.
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How do I shutdown PC's during non-working hours?
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Care Taker offers the ability to enforce a policy specifically setup to shutdown all PC’s after a certain predetermined time. All PC’s which are not being used but still powered on will receive a pop-up message stating that it is past the aforementioned time period and that it is either going to be shutdown or put into standby/hibernate. If an employee is still working they will remain unaffected.
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How do I put a PC into standby or hibernation?
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The administration module will allow for Standby or Hibernate policies to be created. These can be set to be performed after a given time. The default setting recommended by Care Taker is around 5 minutes.
The user can also action standby or shutdown by right-clicking on the Care Taker icon in the system tray, i.e. if they are called into a meeting etc. This will initiate the required action immediately.
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Case Studies
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University calculate an estimated 68% reduction in their PC energy bill with Care Taker
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An analysis of PC user activity at this Scottish university demonstrated how difficult it is to encourage saving through manual means – consistent good power management and minimum energy wastage can realistically only be achieved by an automated software solution such as Care Taker.
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Care Taker works 24/7 for a small enterprise to drive out energy efficiencies
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A medium sized enterprise involved in the oil & gas sector deployed Care Taker as part of an overall green strategy – the ability of Care Taker to generate savings throughout the working day as well as at night and weekends to the tune of 40% was an added bonus.
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Care Taker enables reductions of £000’s off of an organisations energy bill
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A work study undertaken for a large organisation with several thousand computers showed how computer systems use surprisingly large amounts of energy and can significantly contribute to an organisations operational costs and carbon foot print. The implementation of Care Taker can generate significant cost savings - in this case nearly £0.5m and 2,280tonnes of Carbon per annum – and without affecting productivity.
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