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I’m going to tell you a secret: I don’t really turn off my computer. When I finish my workday, I usually unplug my laptop and close the lid. I think most people do this.
Turn off your computer Every night has disadvantages. If you simply put your computer to sleep, everything will be exactly where you left it in the morning. But if you turn off, you have to wait for your computer to start and then reopen all your applications and documents. It’s annoying.
However, many annoying things can save you energy and it is worth thinking about it from an environmental and economic point of view. Would turning off your computer help you save energy and money? She wanted to know.
An idle computer does not consume much power
Putting your computer into sleep mode is easy: on a laptop, you just need to close the lid. Windows offers the feature in the Start menu, macOS offers it in the menu bar, and both operating systems put computers to sleep automatically after a certain period of time by default. If you are not using your device as a server, there is no reason to change this.
But what does it mean for a computer to be “asleep”? It basically means that the computer is not actively working on anything and the power is only used to maintain the RAM, or memory, lose power. RAM is where your computer stores open apps, documents, and browsing tabs, and keeping it running doesn’t consume much power.
I wanted to get an idea of how low power it was, so I ran some simple tests. First, I charged my laptop around 6 pm after an afternoon using it outside. At this point, it was almost fully charged, after which I unplugged it and closed the lid. My laptop’s charge barely decreased, just one percent, and this is on an almost six-year-old laptop with a battery that doesn’t hold a charge like it used to.
However, I wanted a slightly more precise number, so I used a Kill a watt to measure how much power my laptop uses when idle. Leaving it plugged in and suspended from 4 pm until 7 am the next morning (15 hours) consumed 0.02 kWh of energy. That’s not much. Here in Portland, Oregon, the price per kWh for residential use It costs 19.45 cents, which means leaving my laptop plugged in overnight cost me a little over a third of a cent. Over the course of an entire year, this adds up to $1.42.
That’s nothing, but it’s almost nothing. A single 60-watt incandescent bulb consumes 0.06 kWh each. hourthat is, if you even have one in your house replacing them with LED It will save you much more than you could save by turning off your computer. Running an electric clothes dryer consumes about 3 kWh on each charge, meaning skipping a single drying cycle will save you as much energy as turning off your laptop every night for 150 days. Imagine how much more you would save if you skipped a cycle each week or switched to air drying clothes entirely. you could too Invest in a heat pump, which is more efficient than electric or gas heating.to save even more energy.
Simply put, there are many things anyone concerned about energy use can do to save much more electricity and money than turning off the computer at night. Which isn’t to say that turning off your computer at night won’t save you energy; It’s just that the amount of energy you could save is minuscule compared to other changes you could make.
Closing is sometimes still a good idea
Now, this doesn’t mean you should never close yourself off. I turn off my laptop if I go out of town without it for more than a week. At that point, the amount of power the computer will use, compared to the hassle of having to start it again, becomes worth it to me again. Also, sometimes a sleeping laptop runs out of batteries if left alone for so long, which is just annoying.
And there are certain types of computers that might be worth shutting down. If you have a gaming computer that you only use on the weekend, for example, it probably makes sense to turn it off during the week.
And there’s another reason to shut down, or at least restart, your computer regularly: It can sometimes solve annoying computer problems. The main reason for this is software errors; Over time, these problems can fill up your device’s memory and generally just make your computer unstable. But even in the absence of errors, there is a chance that a computer you never turn off could become unstable, and the reason comes from outer space. I’m not kidding: the BBC reported that Cosmic rays from outer space can cause problems for computers:
When computers crash, we tend to assume it’s simply some software problem, a bit of bad programming. But the cause can also be ionizing radiation, including proton rays launched toward us by the sun. These incidents, called single-event disturbances, are rare, and it may be impossible to be sure that cosmic rays were involved in a specific malfunction because they leave no trace behind them.
Between this rare event and more common software errors, even the best-maintained computer will run into quirks from time to time. Shutting down the computer or simply restarting it can help in this situation. So, there are times when you should turn off your computer. But if you have a computer that you use every day and you’d rather just put it to sleep, I don’t think you I should lose a lot of sleep over it.
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