How often do you power down?

fseal said:

Have you added up what a couple $$ a day costs per month? Per year? You could buy an entirely new machine with just the energy savings of turning it off when not using it. :)

It actually doesn't even cost that much but the $10 a month or so it does cost is still worth considering. All for... saving 30 seconds on a boot?

Thing is, everything adds up. And things that are left on 24/7 add up FAST, being comparable to big things that only run for an hour or two a day (or week).

I don't leave it on to spare 30 seconds of boot time. At idle the power draw is completely insignificant. CPUs use EIST to lower power draw, HDDs use insignificant power draw at idle (compared to start up), video cards drop down to fractions of original clock speeds to lower power draw, power supplies are more and more energy efficient, monitors go into stand-by mode, etc.

One could argue the wear and tear of turning a system off and on every day. There's the power surge at initial power on, hard drives really spike, fans usually go full bore. There's the thermal expansion, etc. Of course none of that is entirely proven. Hard drives either die during initial power on or if they have poor circulation and cook. I have never seen a PSU die during use but I have seen them make a long buzz and loud bang when powering on.

I don't know, due to such "green" energy saving technology put into the PC these days there isn't really any valid support to turn them off.

Kirsch said:

With Heavy usage, ALL DAY, and about 1000 watts of equip running (not max available, USED).. then maybe you will reach a couple dollars per day

Well, true. I'm going with worst case scenario. Not all states or countries charge the same for electricity.

Power in idle is still likely high unless you have some specifically low powered hardware, or have some very green hardware that is actually working well togeather. None of my machines have shown that level of idle power saving. At idle the power draw is probably still 100 watts or more (with 300 when playing a game normal).

I actually have a wall power meter at home which I use on the fish tanks (Talk about power hogs). I'll give it a whirl on my main machine tonight... It does have speed step on the i7 so I know that the power consumption is dropped from about 34 watts when playing games down to 8 at idle, but the rest of the system is pretty beefy and the GPU at idle sits at 60C so I know that's probably pulling some wattage, plus the memory MB, 15-20% PSU loss, etc, etc.

I set Sleep for 30 and Hibernate for 60. That way if I walk away and come back it can wake up quickly, but if I don't want to come back it turns off the machine for me with all of my work saved.

My roommate insists on keeping the power on at all times, including on his monitor which just burned out after a year. It irritates all of us who split the power bill.

fseal said:

Power in idle is still likely high unless you have some specifically low powered hardware, or have some very green hardware that is actually working well togeather. None of my machines have shown that level of idle power saving. At idle the power draw is probably still 100 watts or more (with 300 when playing a game normal).

And 100 watts is equal to running a light bulb. It's really not that much.

gregrocker said:

I set Sleep for 30 and Hibernate for 60. That way if I walk away and come back it can wake up quickly, but if I don't want to come back it turns off the machine for me with all of my work saved.

My roommate insists on keeping the power on at all times, including on his monitor which just burned out after a year. It irritates all of us who split the power bill.

You sound like my former mother-in-law who, when I lived with her, insisted that I pay a higher percentage of the electric bill because I left my PC on 24/7. She was the one that would run the oven all day long, which burns up electricity like crazy. Then of course to counter the heat from the oven she would turn down the AC, which burned even more electricity.

A PC running 24/7 is chump change, honestly. Don't make a big deal about it.

whs said:

Every night. Sleep mode during the day.

Same here for me.....never had a problem in doing so. In my case I use Asus software that combines hibernate/sleep-mode and a soft shutdown. I set it to turn everything off after 25 minutes of non use. It's a green thing for conserving power consumption.