Greater Manchester Fire & Rescue are set to use a new power management software in a move that should save the Service thousands of pounds.

Director of information and communication technologies at GMFRS Damian Parkinson said: "We have just implemented a new network and as part of that, we started to do some work on how the network uses energy and where we can change the network to change the energy usage.

"We found 70 percent of PCs were left on at the weekend and where we can apply a policy we will."

The software which has been implemented by Cisco, Verdiem Surveyor 6, allows users to centrally manage and control the energy used by their electronic devices and in a trial at the Service's headquarters in Swinton where 'non-critical'PCs were shut down over the weekend resulted in energy cost savings of £14,000.

Parkinson believes this could increase to over £30,000 once the shutdown policy is implemented across all of the Service's 50 sites in Greater Manchester in May.

GMFRS has a goal of reducing carbon emissions by 25 percent by 2014, in addition to achieving £2.73 million savings in operating costs through its environmental strategy which also includes implementing motion-sensoring lights, voltage power optimisation and telemetry monitoring to limit the amount of water used at different types of fires.

Posted 26/03/2012 by richard.hook@pavpub.com