Ask HN: Should I turn off my idle machine over the weekend?

Yes. At least put it in standby and make sure nothing wakes it up while you're gone.

Here, try this: https://software.intel.com/en-us/articles/intel-power-gadget...

What's your GPU?

> How much energy am I wasting?

Plug it into a kill a watt meter and find out: http://www.p3international.com/products/p4400.html

You should anyway, as it's still a waste of energy, but if you are just curious about usage you can get smart plugs that will tell you how much energy a plug is drawing. That would let you see energy usage, and by extension, the energy bill.

Can't you set it to go to standby after some time? Then it would save energy during the night (or whenever else you aren't using it) as well as at weekends.

Someone needs to do a good xkcd like visual of the relative energy and carbon footprint of things. You can really see a surge of honest yet weird questions like this from people because there has just really been no good accounting and communication to give people a frame of reference.

Personally this is the one I visualize and use as a mental rubric when people ask about individual behavior options: https://i2.wp.com/shrinkthatfootprint.com/wp-content/uploads... but its a decade old and "average american" centered.

I think it would really help both better decision making and better conversations if people understood that there is no one answer to any of these questions. You just have to rank things by footprint and start at your top. If you're doing things that are #7 on your own footprints list instead of things that are #1 - #3 then you're not being an engineer, you're fretting.

You're wasting a fair bit. You can get a qualitative sense by feeling how warm the fan exhaust is: I use my cheese grater Mac Pro to stop my uninsulated home office freezing up in the winter.

However, despite the savings, you may not break even if your PSU fails early due to thermal cycling (probably a rare event, but a PSU for a machine like the one you describe was probably built to be left on in a commercial use case.)

Your computer probably consumes about 100W when idle. The difference between on and off all year is https://www.google.com/search?q=100%20W%20%2A%201%20year%20%... But the weekends would just be $30. If you have reasons to log into your machine remotely that are worth more than $30/yr, then it's worth it.

Question: Other than energy wasting, is it harmful to computers to allow them to idle? We leave dozens of desktops on all the time at my work...most people never even shut theirs down for months.

The only way to know is measuring.

Personally, I don't ever turn my desktop off unless I know I'm going away for at least a week. I've been burned in the past by weird flaky things happening with OS standby and hibernation, so it isn't worth messing with. The other danger is unanticipated OS updates (I have Windows boxes...); I prefer to keep those on my schedule, where I can deal with them, and any resulting fallout, at my leisure.

At the end of the day, running my desktop 24x7 costs me like two or three cups of coffee a month, so I just don't worry about it. It's well below the threshold of things I can spare the mental effort to concern myself about.

For single PC's its not a big deal. When I worked at a small college, we started powering down all pc's 3 hours after the last class in the day, and then waking them all up with WakeOnLan about 30 min before their first classes. Since each lab had 30 pc's, it added up pretty quickly. Also, less AC needed, since they weren't warming up the room all night.

https://semiengineering.com/chip-aging-accelerates/ “We are seeing an acceleration of aging where the chip breaks down. “They may be missing clocks or there is extra jitter. Or there is dielectric breakdown. And anytime something breaks down, there is an avalanche of new things you have to worry about. A lot of aging models advanced in an era where electronics were used sporadically. Now chips are running all the time. Inside of a chip, blocks are heating up, so aging is accelerated. From that you get all types of weird phenomena. A lot of companies have not revised their aging models, either. They assumed these devices would last three to four years, but they may fail sooner. And given that design margins from the beginning can be flimsy, aging can throw them off.”

I think what most of the responses are missing is that the power system is designed for peak power consumption.

And any incremental amount of power needed to meet the peak demand is going to come from inefficient or dirty sources.

Not only should you let it 'idle', you should start hosting servers from home and always leave it on. It's the only form of "distributed" that really works and it gives you complete control over everything.

Why wouldn’t you turn it off? I would turn it of at the end off each workday. Booting a computer is a few minutes at the most, you don’t need to be up and running within seconds each morning. Push the power button, go get coffee, login, start work.

I'm in Sweden. Every year I'm spending April-October in a cute little house built in the 1860s - it used to be the telegraph station for the harbor in this sea-side place back then.

Houses from this period aren't very well insulated (sort of like a contemporary house in California ;) ). So, in April/May/September/October the computers/displays I've brought here are very much a part of the heating. I find this beautiful. They're using like 600-800W at peak, but all of that is being put to use in heating the house. They end up being like 40-50% of the electric heating cost.

(Internet access is provided via LTE. I'm typically getting around 60/30 Mbps. Quota of 50 GB per day. Need to send a text message if you want more.)

I asked this question of myself about 15 years ago and decided to only invest in laptops or systems running laptop parts.

One of the things missing is that some LCDs burn a lot of watts so should be turned off too.

I think sleep/hibernate is reliable on MacOS and maybe windows.

I wonder about linux though.

Typically commercial OS vendors have enough money to pay someone to make resume work. But all the crazy corner cases might be too much for reliability on linux.

Please correct me if I'm wrong.

PSA: instead of buying a kill-a-watt device rather get a smartplug with monitoring. Similar result except has other uses