Have you considered what it costs to leave machines on all the time?
I told one of the staff members at the church that they should go ahead and power down their machine at night. I also told them to turn off the streaming radio station when they are away from their desk. I am always concerned about unnecessary use of power for both cost and environmental reasons.
In a recent study found via eco geek and Gizmodo I read that each year $1.72 Billion is wasted on computers being left on all night. I’m not sure about the findings, but I know we waste a lot of money on our computers. With the bad electricity to our building we are more likely to have a computer destroyed by power surges and brownouts than turning them off 5 times per week.
Consider that the average office work hours are around 48 hours per week (rounded off to make math easier). That is 2 full days.
If you leave your computer and monitor on all the time then they are running for 7 days each week (168 hours).
Running a computer for 48 hours a week vs. 168 hours is like running it for 105 days vs. 365 (a difference of 260 days).
To make this easier to remember, look at your calendar and mark the 105th day: April 15.
Just image how happy your computer would be if it only had to work until tax day each year rather than the entire year.
Make your computer happy. Turn it off.
Does anyone out there have official like rules about turning computers off?
My Mom always has us turn off the computers at night just go give them a rest or something from being used all day. We have five running computers in the house and we use to have seven at once, and most of the time somebody’s on one all the time.
One problem with your numbers… Since the majority of systems today are “green” systems, they power down after a period of inactivity to a low-power mode. You need to look at the total kWh usage of the system, including when it is in power-save mode, rather than the raw number of hours it is up.
(I.e., if you have the system up for 8 hours, in constant use, you will use a lot more power than having it on for 16 hours in power-save mode.)
You can always check your power settings by going to Control Panel / Power Options. From there, you can select from the presets (Home/Office Desk, Portable/Laptop, Presentation, Always On, Minimal Power Management, Max Battery) or configure your own custom settings by tweaking the values given for turning off the monitor, the hard drives, and putting the system in to standby.
I can stick my Kill-A-Watt on some representative systems, but I doubt many of them are doing power downs.
I sneak in and do that to some of them on occasion, but I know people are changing them back.
We probably ought to set these configurations up as part of group policy.
One problem is that some people use Outlook forwarding so they want their system awake and active all the time. With outlook constantly checking the server the hard drive won’t power down.
We do use LCDs, so that helps with the power options.