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The costs of leaving computers on? 2008 December 13

Ted Samson over at Infoworld had a post about a report from Forrester about Five PC power myths debunked. While there was considerable discussion int the comments section of his blog and on slashdot about whether or not they used the correct terminology for the units of measure, no one really challenged the premise. which was that “Energy Star estimates organizations can save from $25 to $75 per PC per year with PC power management” versuses leaving your computer on. I haven’t done the math, but lets assume this savings is correct and assume that we can save the midpoint ($50 per year) by having our employees turn the compute on their desk off on the way home for the evening and turn it back on when they arrive in the morning. With that in mind, lets go through the five myths:

1. Myth No. 1: The power used turning my PC on negates any benefits of turning it off. According to Samson, Forrester says that there is no way that a computer can draw enough energy to make the spike at boot save enough money to make it worth turning the PC off. Fair enough, that makes sense. However, if we figure out the savings per hour (at $50 a year, the savings per day is less than 14 cents – assuming it is spread out over the whole year and not only on workdays), I think we would probably find that turning a computer off for an hour or two would not be worth it money-wise, since we are talking about maybe a penny savings.
2. Myth No. 2: My screen saver is saving me energy. OK, what is this doing in an article or report for IT people. Does any IT person worth even a fraction of their salary believe a screen saver saves energy compared to a monitor being off? Maybe an office user might, but even that seems like a stretch. There may be some debate as to whether or not a screen saver saves your screen, but this is not the issue at hand. This alone as a myth buster makes this $270 report susceptible.
3. Myth No. 3: Turning my PC on and off will reduce its performance and useful life. According to Forrester this isn’t true with current machines, if it ever was. In the comments on the blog and on slashdot, some people disputed this. I really don’t know if this is true anymore or not. I suspect if you have a regular replacement schedule and you replace you PCs every 4 or 5 years, any effect on the useful life would be minimal. In other words, I’ll agree with the report here absent of any other information to the contrary,
4. Myth No. 4: I can’t run updates and patches for PCs in lower-power states. OK, here we are talking about automated maintenance. In theory, the report is correct that you can use things such as WOL (Wake on LAN) technology. However, many people I talk to report that they have had trouble with this technology, Assuming people are taking advantage of automated patching over night, I can see the argument for using WOL. However, if it is unreliable, and causes more than one problem per year per PC for automated patching, the IT staff time involved to fix it will far outweigh the savings realized by using WOL. In other words, this option needs to be throughly tested in each environment before rolling it out and may or may not lead to the $50 per year savings per machine depending on individual circumstances.
5. Myth No. 5: My PC users will not tolerate any downtime for power management. The report claims that “potential user complaints can be mitigated by communicating the positive financial and environmental benefits of PC power management.” Ha Ha! That is funny! I’m going to tell staff we may save14 cents per day but they have to wait around for their PC to start up in the morning, and they have to shut down the PC at night? OK, I can buy some employees liking the environmental factor, but even if the savings were triple, I am going to convince them that financially it is beneficially to save 45 ¢. Even an employee making the New York minimum wage ($7.15 per hour or about 12 cents a minute) with absolutely no costs for benefits (which by the way, is not possible legally because their are mandatory employer contributions), if it takes more than 4 minutes of staff time to start and stop a PC, it is a losing proposition financially.

So in summary, depending on the situation, you may save a very minimal amount per PC by using power savings features, but I doubt was you factor in staff time, possible wear and tear on the PC, and the time setting up features such as WOL would the savings amount to everything significant. At bast, it would just be shifting costs. This is one thing that the blog post doesn’t address, in many place of employment, electricity is not charged to individual departments, so any staff time devoted to making PCs or other tools more energy efficient is lost for the department. In other words, there is little incentive.

What are we to do then. Well, each place needs to evaluate what works best for their environment, but if you are expecting huge returns in energy savings by having employees turn on and off computers, I think you will be disappointed. My personal thoughts based on this report would be that it might be worth looking into turning PCs off over the weekend (and during vacations) but not to worry about it at other times. One reason why I say that is there are also some performance benefits to rebooting a PC once in awhile, especially if it is running Microsoft Windows , but I still am not sure that it would offer anything more than a negligible amount of savings. What could, however, offer some savings is purchasing and demanding from manufactures more energy efficient computers. In that case, even when people are using their computers businesses will see energy savings. Of course, if the energy efficiency is outweighed by the computers costing more than the savings, the point is moot.

BTW: Since this is an academic library-related blog, I would say I don’t see any financial advantage of turning PCs off in the public areas based on this study except if the library is going to be closed for more than a day. The savings of an average of $50 per year is based on computers being idle for 16 hours, Thus, if your open more than 8 hours a day, the savings would be less. Many academic libraries are open closer to 16 hours, which would cut the potential savings in half. In this case, it seems apparent that unless you have fully automated your shutdown and startup procedures, the cost savings would be quickly absorbed by the staff time required to walk around the building shutting computers down.