Green computing

Environmentally responsible computing - Minimising PC energy consumption 

As part of the University's commitment to reducing its carbon footprint, IT Services continually strive to reduce and control the amount of energy used in running PCs. 

A product called NightWatchman centrally manages the power state of staff and student PCs to minimise energy usage, while ensuring that necessary security updates can be applied to maintain a secure and stable computing environment for our staff and students. 

NightWatchman is helping to reduce average PC power costs from £36,000 each month to under £20,000, an average saving of over £16,000 each month. 

When are PCs powered down? 

Currently all staff and student computers are being powered down and woken up using NightWatchman every day. 

  • Staff PCs are shutdown at 18:00. They are powered on between 06:45-07:15 
  • Student PCs are shutdown at 23:15 in the libraries (Aldham/Avril/Marsh) and 21:00 everywhere else and then woken up between 06:00-06:45 

Please do not leave your PC 'locked' overnight

If you do this, it cannot be rebooted and important updates installed. We advise that staff log off their PC at the end of their working day and leave the PC switched on. If you have a need for the PC to be left logged on overnight, please get in touch with the ITS Helpdesk on x5555 and we will discuss other options available to you.

Our Datacentre

The University datacentres house the servers that provide important services such as Staff InfoBase, the Student Information System, Email and much, much more. The University’s primary datacentre is a HP Performance Optimised Datacentre (POD). Aside from being a safe, reliable and stable environment for our servers, protected from power fluctuations and other undesirable conditions, it contains an assortment of state-of-the-art energy saving technologies that combine to save thousands of pounds every year in cooling costs by making the most of the UK climate!   Since the POD was moved to its new location in Byrom Street in December 2017, the electricity bill was reduced by an impressive 23% - from £59K in 2017 to £43k in 2018. Carbon emissions in the same period were reduced from 167 tCO2 to 128 tCO2,