Source: Tom's Guide US | Keywords: PC, Money, Report, Environment | Themes: Laptops and Notebooks, Desktop Computers
A report by 1E says that businesses and general consumers save money by shutting down the PC when not in use. Unfortunately, tech-savvy consumers know better.
There's nothing like a good report to say just how terrible and wasteful consumers are, especially when it comes to money and the environment. 1E is the latest firm to do so, publishing its PC Energy Report 2009 spanning the United States, the United Kingdom, and Germany (pdf). The company opens up the report to explain its purpose: addressing the issue of energy waste caused by leaving PCs on overnight. While that's all good and admirable--after all, saving energy saves a few dollar signs--there's a good reason why most PCs remain on: to extend their life.
According to a separate survey conducted by 1E back in 2008, 50 percent of employed U.S. adults using PCs at work generally do not shut them down at the end of the day. Naturally, the company doesn't say who was questioned, or how many participants were actually in the survey, however 1E concludes--based on the data collected by this survey--that companies across the U.S. are wasting a whopping $2.8 billion, and even emitting 20 million tons of carbon dioxide simply because PCs are shut down overnight.
"This figure is based on a conservative estimate of 14.6 hours for the overnight period, and 48 hours on the weekend," the company said. "Under this scenario, a single U.S. company with 10,000 PCs wastes more than $260,000 annually and generates 1,871 tons of carbon dioxide emissions."
The company also discovered that it's the Americans who are wasteful power hogs. According to their research, European users are better at saving energy. 56 percent of employees in the UK and Germany actually shut down the PCs overnight. Those who do not are costing employers 285,000 Euros and 168,000 Pounds each year respectively, especially within companies housing 10,000 PCs or more.
But there is a rainbow at the end of the tunnel: more people actually power down their PCs at home than they do at work. In the UK, 78 percent turn off the home PC, and in Germany, 78 percent do the same. However, those wasteful power hungry Americans fall at the back of the line, with 63 percent of the population turning off the PC at home. Additionally, a vast majority of employed adults who use a PC at work also do so at home (97 percent in the U.S., 96 percent in the UK, 97 percent in Germany).
"If all of the world's 1 billion PCs were powered down for just one night, it would save enough energy to light up New York City's Empire State Building--inside and out--for more than 30 years," claims the company.
That would certainly be an interesting experiment: have the nation's PCs shut down for one night--call it PC Shutoff Day or something--and see exactly how much power is saved in the process. However, many hardcore PC builders and repair shops will say that turning off the PC on a regular basis is unhealthy for the computer. When powered, the motherboard circuitry expands, and thus contracts when the PC shuts down. The constant expand/contract method on a daily basis will eventually blow the motherboard altogether. With that said, business owners and consumers must weigh the differences accordingly: the money saved by shutting down the PC versus the cost of repairing or replacing the said PC. There's certainly no conspiracy theory to feed the global market for IT power management.
"Employers today have a golden opportunity to demonstrate environmental and financially astute thought leadership by taking a few simple, energy-saving measures, such as setting up processes to power down PCs," said 1E chief executive officer Sumir Karayi. "Every day that passes is a lost opportunity to save money and reduce your carbon footprint. We hope you'll act now to take this opportunity to make a difference."
So what's the best option then? Leave the computer running until it eventually burns itself out? Or turn off the PC every night--or for long periods of inactivity--and save not only energy, but a little bit of money. That's a good debate that will probably never reach a resolution.
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At my company, we always leave our PC's on overnight mainly because we have patches and other updates that are run and installed along with antivirus updates, file backups, etc...
Odd, from what I know, leaving your systems on 24/7 hurts the system through heat generation and system throttling. I've been working with computers for 75% of my life and all these systems have a good 7 years lifespan so, I don't see why people say to leave your system on 24/7. Even if, you'll end up spending more money on energy than on a new system throughout its whole lifetime and its damaging for the environment so best to turn off your systems regardless if you believe leaving your system on 24/7 is a better idea.
"Extending the life of your PC" is a horrible argument for not turning it off when not in use. We don't leave our cars running all day long, even though turning them off and on does the exact same sort of expand-contract damage to the engine.
Out of all of the PCs I've owned or used at work - both pre-built and those I built myself - none have experienced motherboard failure as a result of turning them off at night and on during the day. Hell, none of the motherboards in them went out to begin with.
Keep in mind most retail motherboards have a 3-year warranty anyways - if it goes bad, get it replaced! If you can't get 3 years out of your motherboard even when turning it off and on every day, then there's something else wrong with your system.
"Extending the life of your PC" is a horrible argument for not turning it off when not in use. We don't leave our cars running all day long, even though turning them off and on does the exact same sort of expand-contract damage to the engine.
Out of all of the PCs I've owned or used at work - both pre-built and those I built myself - none have experienced motherboard failure as a result of turning them off at night and on during the day. Hell, none of the motherboards in them went out to begin with.
Keep in mind most retail motherboards have a 3-year warranty anyways - if it goes bad, get it replaced! If you can't get 3 years out of your motherboard even when turning it off and on every day, then there's something else wrong with your system.
We leave all out units on @ night so we can push down patches with Patchlink..
I have discussed turning the machines off at night with our IT Director to save money, but nothing will come of it I’m sure. We run patches very rarely (1 every 2 months) and programs like anti-virus pull from the server…
There is just no reason to leave 800 units running 24/7. We do turn the lights out when we go home….
I always turn my home PC off at bedtime. After 3 years of doing this, it is still going strong. It will (or already has) become obsolete long before it dies.
I'm actually incredibly skeptical at any PC builder that thinks turning off their computer decreases its life cycle significantly. With today's PCB manufacturing processes the mobo is surely not going to be the first to fail. As an avid overclocker I put my rigs through thousands on/off power cycles needlessly at high temp/volts. Thats because components can go through upwards of 40,000 on/off cycles with no effect nowadays. Never had any component fail, except for a hard disk. Leaving a PC on keeps hard disks spinning with no purpose, creates excess heat stress, wear, etc.
Keep in mind most retail motherboards have a 3-year warranty anyways - if it goes bad, get it replaced!
When I have a hardware issue in our business environment I get the unit replaced by Lenovo, QUICK! Service agreements pretty much cover everything.
I just pull a new laptop/Desktop from the back, image it and set up the user locally. Then I secure data disposal the HDD on the broken unit and ship to Lenovo. They send a replacement unit whenever….
How much would it cO2 would be created by manufacturing a new system and shipping it to you when the old dies early? More or less than that single system creates while being left on?
How much co2 will be created by manufacturing and shipping a new system due to your old one dieing early?
Idiotic. Mythbusters did a study on dispelling light bulb myths. The myth that turning on a lightbulb uses more energy than that which is saved by turning it off. The breakeven point was like 1.5 seconds. That is, if you're going to be away for greater than 1.5 seconds, turn off the freaking light!
I always power down my PC when I won't be using it for over 1/2 an hour. I'm able to because I've defragged and streamlined my start up programs so that it only takes 45 seconds from pressing the power button to start button access. Office computers usually take 2 minutes + to start up so it really causes people not to bother shutting it down. SSD's will help in that respect. You'll have no reason not to shut down if it can be turned on in 15 seconds.
How much would it cO2 would be created by manufacturing a new system and shipping it to you when the old dies early? More or less than that single system creates while being left on?
Unfortunately the article makes no mention of the supposed increase in failure rates due to turning off computers, probably because it would be extremely difficult to determine if that was indeed the precise reason for a motherboard failure.
Even if the failure rate of a motherboard was say, doubled or tripled by the practice of turning the system off and on, having everyone in the world turn off their machines at night for one day would, as the article said, save enough energy to power the empire state building for 30 years. That's a lot of power, and a lot of CO2 not generated to boot. Whomever these "hardcore PC builders and repair shops" are, they need to provide some statistics to back up their claim that the supposed increase (if it is even quantifiable) in failure rates would require more power to repair/replace those boards.
To quote Wikipedia - [citation needed].
The next article headline going to be "Report: Water found to be wet"
What about people like me who leave their PCs on overnight to Fold@home? Are we "wasteful power hogs"?
As pointed out, in some environments, PCs must be left on to receive patches and updates. As more and better power-saving features are built into the BIOS and/or OS, and as PSU efficiency improves, the issue of waste should diminish considerably. So leave it on.
Thermal cycling might eventually work the RAM chips or even the CPU up out of their sockets on the original IBM PC, and other similar models of that "era," but this has also become a non-issue. So turn it off.
Which way do you go? I'm all for being more green, but I don't think this discussion is the place to spend the effort. Go get CFL bulbs. Turn your thermostat down in winter and up in summer. Insulate your attic. Walk a block or two each way, or at least combine all those little trips into one. There are so many better ways to expend the same amount of effort to save energy and reduce waste.
... or we could just get low power phenom CPUs
For the home enviorment, either point is pretty argumentative. However in a corporate enviroment, it means large savings. My company uses 1E software to power off machines that are left on for greater than 9 hours, which saves aprox 500k a year. These computers also have a short lifespan in the corporate world, as many companies lease their computers. Our lease period is 2 to 2-1/2 years, hardly enough time to cause long term damage, and if it does, its under warranty.
What is even more maddening (to me... :-) ) is that everyone runs screensavers that spend the entire night floating things around on the screen. The CPU use results in even more power being wasted.
I actually power down monitors as I walk out of the building. Of course this was worse not to long ago when CRTs were common.
For the companies that roll out patches and backups at night, you can set the machines up to sleep and wake up remotely.
"... or we could just get low power phenom CPUs"
And then overclock them heheh.
Not to mention the increased dust that clogs your fans if you keep systems on all the time.
how does leaving your computer on extend its life? i have a computer that i used & abused for 10 years, never left on overnight (or at least while I sleep) still works,,,,I have had friends that leave their computer on all the time,,guess what? they all have to have their power supplies replaced & all of them lucky they were in the same room as the computer was when they exploded,,its dangerous to leave a computer on all the time
I question these 'enthusiasts' that the author has mentioned. I've had a good old Pentium 4 2.53GHz on an Asus P4S533-E with Kingston RAM. It's been running for a good old 6 years, and I don't see it giving up anytime this month or year. The only reason I would give up on the damn thing is because it's a hell of a lotta slow compared to today's computers.
What I've always believed is that if you buy crappy no-named brands, then that is what you get, crap. Investing in a good, solid brand with the right price (some of the good stuff could get really cheap), would help with the longevity of the system. There's a reason why brands such as ECS, Inno3d, etc, don't have that much publicity and reviews.
Oh and the one time I picked up a virus on my computer was at night when I left it on (the single night I have ever left a work computer going) and I got a virus through an MSDE install that didn't have a password (we thought it did). It just seems like leaving it on so long without being attended opens you up to more security risks. At least if you are there when it is on you realize there is a problem quickly instead of 9 hours later.
My computer is part of a bot farm that sends spam out for 10 hours per night. I leave it on so you can get your pen1s enlargement meds.
Why has only one person so far mentioned standby mode? If the computers are fairly recent they will use much less energy than being left fully operational. And they will wake up on their own for patches and such if it is scheduled and return to standby when finished.
One thing that businesses and schools are doing that is really costing a massive amount of money is using pc's with Pentium 4's and old components that consume huge amounts of power and deliver horrible performance especially considering the amount power they consume. Then on top of power costs and bad performance is the cost of upkeep and maintenance on systems that are on their last legs.
Not all businesses are that way but the school that I work at is, especially with the bad economy limiting the budget even more than before.
At home I only leave my server running 24x7. It needs to accept connections from family etc at all times of the day. When it was built 3 years ago I selected the components so that it only consumes an average of 55 or 56 watts (measured with a kill-a-watt between it and the wall). All my other home systems are off when not in use.
Work is a different story. My lab machine remains running 24x7 in case I need to connect to the VMs it runs over the weekend or at night. My other work systems are turned off when not in use.
"The next article headline going to be "Report: Water found to be wet""
You know I read the article name and went , well no shit Sherlock.
My computer is part of a bot farm that sends spam out for 10 hours per night. I leave it on so you can get your pen1s enlargement meds.
Lol that’s a post I didn’t imagine seeing.
I leave my pc on over night because my pc is my tv, my alarm clock, plays me music while im sleeping, hosts files, and functions as a phone (skype). Then I also have my Server which obviously is on all the time. I guess i am the doom of the earth, but when you consider that I don't have all those other devices "tv phone etc" im not wasting energy in that area. Everything is done on one single device. Doesn't that make more sense?
I have a 6 year old P4. Gets turned on->off every day (or put to deep stand-by). I call BS on the wearing out thing. Even if it does, after 6 years you're ready for a new PC anyway. Save some freakin power and shut down, unless you're folding.
And to jwl3 the guy who shuts down when he's away for more than 1/2 hour - why not use Sleep/Stand-by? Uses a couple watts to keep the RAM refreshed, everything else shuts off. PC leaps back to life in 2 seconds, a lot better than waiting 45.
won't the electrolyte in the capacitors start escaping if it is left on all the time, capacitors have a life span and as far as I recall if you leave the PC on for 3 years straight, the components with electrolytic capacitors will die. solid capacitors use electrolyte as well and last longer, but they don't last forever. i've never kept my system on overnight unless there was a reason to.