The best way to save power is not to use any. Ha! Fat chance. We are Mac users, we are iPhone junkies, we have daisy-chained power strips in every outlet and warts on every wall. Luckily there are ways to mitigate our thirst for the juice; some are free, others cost less than $20, and a few are hefty investments for the greenest of the tree frogs. But every little bit helps.

Saving Energy 101: The Energy Saver Panel
The first step on your journey to enlightenment and smaller utility bills is getting intimate with your Mac’s built-in power-management tools, found in System Preferences > Energy Saver. Here’s what to do when you get there, and some other tips for helping your Mac use less power.

Apple’s Energy Usage Calculator (www.apple.com/environment/resources/calculator.html) estimates a 75 percent savings when using the Energy Saver features on a Mac Pro or iMac, compared to keeping it running 24/7 with no energy-management enabled. The feature defaults to sleep mode after 10 minutes of inactivity, but try nudging the slider down to 5, and put the display to sleep even sooner than that. Give yourself a few days to get used to it—you can always slide it back up if it’s really that annoying to have to wake your Mac up after it’s been idling. But the savings can be significant.

An idle Mac equals more of your greenbacks 
in the power company’s coffers.

If you have a laptop, don’t forget that you can use different settings when you’re using the battery and when the Mac is plugged in. Under the Settings For drop-down, make sure to visit all the preferences for both Battery and Power Adapter.

Laptops have two sets of settings.

Check this box, and your drive will spin down when it’s not needed. If your Mac is doing light duty (say, you’re shopping on eBay) and the hard drive isn’t being read or written to, it doesn’t need to be spinning--the Mac just uses its main memory, the RAM, instead.

Devices plugged into your USB or FireWire ports draw electricity too--not much, but enough that you should unplug them when you’re not using them.

Apple keyboards have screen brightness adjustments along the top row--use them! If your Mac notebook has backlit keys, you’ll save a little electricity by leaving them off when you can, especially if you rock an external keyboard.

When your laptop is charged to 100 percent, unplug it! Let it run down to 20 percent or so, then plug it back in. You’ll be conditioning your battery and using a little less electricity to boot.

Lights Out ($9.99, www.northernsoftworks
.com) gives you more flexible power management than what’s offered in System Preferences. Use it to customize Energy Saver settings for specific apps, and even have the Mac shut down (instead of just going to sleep) after a specified period of idle time.

Lights Out offers more than the regular Energy Saver.