The value of turning off your computer at the end of a work day has long been debated in many offices. Is it better for the life of the computer to just keep it on? Does it really save energy to turn it off at night or is this a myth outweighed by the longevity you gain in your computers life span by just keeping it on?

In order to better support my “opinion” that powering down is better and confidently encourage my co-workers to do the same I downloaded an energy calculating widget from HP.

At the end of the day It not only gave me the amount of energy saved by powering down it also gave some more practical comparisons of what that energy could do, such as the number of cars removed from the road.



These numbers sounded good to me but I was still having a hard time understanding what kind of impact they could make and what others things I could do with this saved energy. It seemed like the most important thing to understand was, what you can do with a kilowatt-hour?

A quick Google search and I found out you can:

• Power a 100 Watt lamp for 10 hours
• Power a 10 Watt energy-saving high-frequency lamp for 100 hours
• Power a gamer-PC for 3 hours
• Power a laptop computer for 24 hours
• Provide power for 24 hours of Christmas tree lights
• Let you vacuum-clean your house for 45 minutes
• Boil 5 liters of water with an electrical water heater
  
  I have only measured a mere 8 days but I can imagine if everyone in our 14 person office powered down every day for just a year the energy saved could be significant.
  
  And what about the flip side of this argument? Are we saving valuable kilowatts of power at the cost of wearing down our computers at a faster rate? According to our own office IT person this is not the case at all. In fact he says that “the amount of ware on a computer hardware due to turning it on and off is negligible in comparison to the energy saved”. He said this is largely due to the fact that regardless of computer habits the average life of a computer is 2-3 years ….not a significant enough amount of time to be affected by this constant turning on and off. In the past when people used their computers up to 8 years it would have been an issue, but not today with the rapid turnover of computers. He also said that many companies now are forcing people to turn their computers off by programming them to automatically power down if they have been idle for a certain amount of time.
  
  

Of course we all want to save energy and reduce carbon emissions but from a business standpoint there is also an incentive to power down to save money. HP not only provides the widget tool but also an Energy Calculator that translates our energy use into dollars.

As a test I picked a computer similar to the ones we use here at BRAVE and looked at the saving times 14 people.



It was interesting because the calculator not only provided information for the standard setup but compared it to a more energy efficient system. The more energy efficient computer setup cost almost half as much over a year period. This included using special software that helped user use less energy by having automatic shutoff and hibernate features.

Powering down our computers may add a few minutes to the end or beginning of our day but it’s a great way to save energy, save money and help reduce your office carbon footprint. You can check out the very neat HP Widget and Energy Calculator to see what changes you could make.