Apr
13
Recently there has been a lot of debate surrounding the issue of turning your computer off at night. USA Today ran an article stating that US companies waste almost $3 billion a year in energy costs by leaving PC’s on when nobody is using them. That’s about 20 million tons of carbon dioxide emitted into the atmosphere, or the equivalent of 4 million cars driving for a year.
The USA Today article is based on a report by 1E, and energy-management software company that consults with companies like Dell to save them millions every year in energy costs. Their report says that if every unused PC on the planet was shut down for just one night, it would save enough energy to power the Empire State Building for over 30 years!
An article by Monte Enbysk on the Microsoft Small Business Center website says that companies can save as much as $90 per computer, per year by simply setting their PC’s to “Hibernate” at the end of the day. When you’re talking about companies with tens, hundreds, or even thousands of computers, the savings can really add up.
A recent article on BNET debates the true cost savings of turning computers off at night by factoring in lost productivity due to boot-up and shut-down times. This argument is irrelevant when it comes to pure energy savings and environmental concerns. In this era of global responsibility and planetary awareness, simply saving energy from being needlessly wasted should be motivation enough. Not to mention, most employees waste more time grabbing the morning coffee than booting up their computers, so I doubt any real productivity is lost.
Monte Enbysk in the Microsoft article also states that setting your PC to “Hibernate” reduces your PC energy usage to about 2.3 watts, virtually the same as turning it off. This will reduce your boot-up time to less than 30 seconds, since you don’t have to do a “hard” re-boot. In combination with turning off your monitors, this may the perfect energy saving solution. Just make sure you use the hibernate setting instead of “sleep”, which uses much more power.
Energy Saving Tips:
-Ask your IT department about setting PC’s to automatically hibernate after an hour of inactivity.
-Set your monitor to turn off after 20 minutes of inactivity. Screen savers can suck quite a bit of energy.
-Set all group printers to enter standby mode after 30 minutes of inactivity.
Judging by the feedback on some of these other articles, this tends to be a very polarizing issue. Do you turn off your computer at night? Do you care about your employer’s energy costs, or are you more concerned with a speedy boot-up in the morning? Do environmental concerns play into your decision at all? Have you never considered the ramifications of leaving your computer running at night?
