
Ask HN: Should I turn off my idle machine over the weekend? - rahulskn86
Monitors turn off automatically,
Processor: Intel Zeon E5-1660 16 core, 3.2 GHz,
Memory: 64 GB,
Typical apps open: IDE&#x27;s and browser,
OS: Linux Ubuntu 16.04.6<p>How much energy am I wasting?
======
pwg
> How much energy am I wasting?

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

~~~
badams2527
Out of curiosity, how often do you use a Kill A Watt meter? $23 seems like a
high price just to plug a device into for a couple days to say "oh maybe I
should turn this off more often"

~~~
pwg
Myself? Never, as I don't have one. When I want to find out what a device is
consuming, I hook it up through my Fluke multimeter to obtain the current
draw, then calculate the rest.

But, for general use by anyone not a EE or Electrician, hooking up a general
purpose multimeter to mains power to measure current draw is a _not
recommended_ , _much danger here_ , operation.

Therefore I erred on the side of caution and recommended the method that was
most safe for all involved in all situations.

What I suspect you will find, however, is that you will find uses for the
device that you never anticipated once you have one.

------
vortico
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%...](https://www.google.com/search?q=100%20W%20%2A%201%20year%20%2A%20%240.10%20%2F%20kWh)
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.

~~~
atonse
Wake-On-Lan was good for exactly this kind of use case, but it never quite
picked up.

Also newer PCs generally use less than that, probably closer to 50W idle?

~~~
rasz
never quite picked up as in got so standard and ubiquitous you dont even
notice it?

~~~
atonse
Is to built into Remote Desktop clients? Doubt it.

------
WhompingWindows
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.

~~~
pmiller2
Technically yes. There are 3 types of phenomena that cause transistors to
degrade or fail. All 3 are caused by electrons flowing through the gates. See
[https://semiengineering.com/transistor-aging-
intensifies-10n...](https://semiengineering.com/transistor-aging-
intensifies-10nm/)

Practically speaking, however, I doubt it makes much of a difference for most
desktop systems.

~~~
monocasa
There's way more in computers than transistors ; you have to weigh that
against the other effects on the complete system. I would be surprised if the
thermal cycling from shutting down and booting the computer wasn't orders of
magnitude more likely to cause problems than actual wear on the transistors.
That being said, all of these issues are very unlikely to occur.

------
kwhitefoot
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.

------
scrumper
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.)

~~~
pmiller2
That reminds me of how the main computer lab where I went to grad school was
normally quite chilly in the winter, except near finals. The heat generated by
all the PCs, printers, and people caused it to be nice and toasty near finals.

------
tpmx
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.)

~~~
interactivecode
any resources on finding and staying long term in cabins/houses like that? I
would love to stay 4-6 months in cute little cabins. Vacation rentals aren't
really it

~~~
tpmx
In general: I think you need bite the bullet and actually buy one. :)

For Sweden: if you're able to avoid the most beautiful month (july), should
probably able to secure something nice for for hire. You should be able to
seal a deal renting one of these places from april 1st to just before
midsummer eve, an from like august 1st to october 1st. :)

------
jammaloo
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.

------
mrweasel
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.

~~~
rambojazz
That's a good advice if you're a clerk. As a developer, I have services,
daemons, build processes, open sessions of any kind, it's just simpler to let
the PC idle a few hours than restarting all those sessions every day!

------
thrower123
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.

------
superkuh
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.

~~~
kodablah
I think if more people had reliable always-on home boxes, software devs would
have a better target for distributed tech (and one would expect it'd be
incumbent upon the software to figure out reachability w/ ISP/NAT issues).

Similarly, if more people had always-on home boxes, many mobile apps might be
thin clients to at-home software opening up plenty of possibilities. (even a
simple VNC-like proxy to an at-home web browser w/ advanced ad blocking or
other extensions can help those in walled gardens who could tolerate the
latency)

------
briffle
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.

~~~
jrockway
This seems like the best plan to me. Nobody wants to wait for their computer
to boot when they show up in the morning, but you can still be smart and save
some power overnight.

------
sp332
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...](https://software.intel.com/en-us/articles/intel-power-gadget/)

What's your GPU?

~~~
LinuxBender
Modern GPU's support power saving. In linux you can see it with PowerTop and
you can toggle it on / off.

~~~
georgem4
powertop is great for figuring out what is bringing the CPU out of idle states
too. One tip is to close your web browser as it's probably going to be one of
the most wasteful things to leave running.

------
m463
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.

------
Lind5
[https://semiengineering.com/chip-aging-
accelerates/](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.”

------
cagenut
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...](https://i2.wp.com/shrinkthatfootprint.com/wp-
content/uploads/2014/01/American-carbon-footprint.gif) 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.

~~~
Symbiote
I received an email from the power company last month, announcing they were
moving to a time based tariff.

It's not a new idea for me, my previous country has had this for decades.

But the email suggested setting the dishwasher to run overnight, and charging
my phone and electric car overnight.

One of these is not like the others. The saving would be a about 40¢/year.

The phone example had been removed from the website, so at least someone
noticed. But someone working at the power company wrote that email...

------
pwrsysengineer
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.

------
sys_64738
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.

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

