Granola Power App Helps You Save the Environment and Your Wallet

If you want to shave a few bucks off your electric bill and save a couple trees, the most common methods involve buying all new appliances and just turning everything off all the time. But you can actually trim your bills and reduce your carbon footprint with a simple piece of software called Granola. This little applet sits in the system tray of your Linux or Windows PC, monitors how much energy your processor is using and scales back on the Mhz when not needed. There really isn’t much to Granola; you download it, install it and run it. If you really deem it necessary, you change the default power settings (although we’ve found the standard settings strike the perfect balance between energy savings and performance). Choose between three different energy-saving profiles, essentially translating to low, middle and high power. The preferences menu has just a few other options, letting you customize how Granola reports your power savings. You can choose your currency (only American dollars, British pounds and Euros for now), set the cost per kWh in your area, choose between pounds and kilograms for CO2 measurements, and choose between cumulative or annual reporting.