Power-on-Demand



Power on demand
Power-on-Demand


Over a period of time, it was observed that a lot of electricity was being wasted at the NIIT centres. The biggest cause of this wastage was the failure to switch off the lights, air-conditioners and computers in the classrooms and machine rooms even when they were not required. To overcome this problem, CRCS designed the Power-on-Demand (POD) system to minimise the electricity wastage without disrupting the services offered by NIIT to its students.

A Power-on-Demand is a micro-controller based system, which can control up-to 9 electrical circuits. It controls the following entities in classrooms and computer rooms:
  • All air-conditioners
  • All lights except emergency lights
  • All computer (UPS) circuits except server in machine room.
When a POD system is installed each room (class-rooms, computer rooms etc.) has a speaker and two extra switches along with two LEDs (red and green) besides all the normal switches for lights, ACs, computers etc.. As the normal duration of a class is 2 hours, one of the switches powers the circuit for 1 hour 55 minutes and the other one for 5 minutes. At the expiry of 1hour 55 minutes period, a periodic audio alarm is generated indicating that power shutdown will start within 5 minutes. At this point the instructor can request for the power for another 5 minutes or for another two hours.

The system is in operation in Delhi (ITO Centre) and Pune (two centres) since May 1998. The cost saving calculations on AC circuits at the ITO centre after the deployment of POD showed a saving of about 13%.

For more details contact: Vivek Rana