The Official ClassB Blog

We have some new designs we are considering adding to the Trading post. Please help us decide which ones to print, vote for the ones you like and also tell us the ones you do not like. You can vote by replying to this post, thank you! When we print the batch they will be sold in the trading post. You can vote for more than one design.

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UPDATE: Clarified you can vote for more than one design.

We will be posting some new T-shirt designs on the trading post for sale in the next few days. Here is a preview of the upcoming designs:

We will hopefully be also selling these thru the online scout store, Trailstop.com

UPDATE: Updated links to point to Trailstop trading post pages

While we were working on the Eco-T program, we came across a cool gadget for measuring power consumption. A thought came to mind as the breaker tripped for the 100th time, how much power do the computers actually use? I bought one of these:

Its a Kill-a-watt, an energy use measuring tool. We plugged it into some of our computers and measured how much energy they use. We made some interesting discoveries that have led to some very significant changes in our energy consumption.

We have a variety of computers here, some older G5 Power Macs, many Mac Minis and the newest computers are intel iMacs and Mac Pros. The average power consumption at very low load of an older G5 Powermac tower, both sans monitor was 6x the power usage of a Mac mini! As far as power cost goes, that a yearly $165 vs $29. One of the G5 Powermacs was a quad processor, a water cooled monster that was our old server. It has a $389 yearly cost to operate! The iMacs with monitors come in at $115 per year. LCD Monitors cost $60-110 to operate per year depending on size and make.

Our computers have to be on all the time, so sleep was not an option since the connection to the server would be severed in a bad way. So we looked into having the server connections sleep before the computers sleep. We installed a script that achieved this and set the majority of the stores computers to sleep when the store is closed. This should shave off 60-70% of our energy consumption. The difference between a G5 Powermac and a intel Mac Mini was so dramatic that we decided to retire 4 of the older towers and replace them. We sold them on eBay for even out dollars for the minis but will cut power usage to 18% of the original usage!

We have one PC in the store that we measured, an Alienware. OMG, it was just as bad as the Quad G5, $345 a year. We will stick with mac minis whenever possible.

I love these little computers, they are the best! I cannot wait for the next revision, we are going to replace 5 of our older PowerMacs.

We have about 30 Macs at the office and the overall savings in power usage is huge, all of this just by taking a little time and looking at how we can reduce our impact. We saved money and electricity! By the way, the mac minis are faster than the G5 Powermac towers, a total win, no matter how you look at it. Now that we know how much a computer can use in power over its lifetime, we will take that into consideration when choosing our upgrades.

If you’re thinking about buying a Kill-a-watt, there’s a small design flaw we noticed. It needs a small extension cord to be able to twist and see the readout. We picked some up at Target and they worked great.

Hello!

We have just posted a new section on ClassB.com; our Eco-T program.

We spent the past year working on it. It’s been very challenging since halfway through many factors changed. We became aware of the CPSIA 2008 rules in early summer and this info changed some of our approach. We decided to include enviromental impact and health and safety into one all encompassing program. This made the Eco-T program a bit too large to handle so we have launched Eco-T as a work in progress. Which is appropriate since we will never stop trying to do better.

Please take a moment and fill out the survey to help us decide where to focus our energies.