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America wastes gazillions with always-on PCs

Switched off to the environment

Next time you leave the office, turn off your machine. According to a new report, the typical mid-sized American business wastes more than $165,000 a year in electricity costs thanks to PCs left on through the night. That’s more than $1.72bn in wasted funds across the country.

Simply by turning off machines during night hours, the report says, the average business could also eliminate 1,381 tons of carbon dioxide emissions each year, which translates to nearly 15 million tons nationwide.

Run by Harris Interactive, the report (PDF) was commissioned by the Alliance To Save Energy, a coalition that promotes efficient energy use, and 1E, a British-based systems management company.

As of May, the report claims, there were 104 million Americans who regularly used PCs at work, and 20 per cent “never” shut their machines down. Meanwhile, 60 per cent shut down only on occasion. The nighttime carbon dioxide emissions from these machines, the report goes on to say, is equivalent to the carbon spewed by 2.58 million passenger cars – more than are currently registered in the state of Maryland.

El Reg readers in the UK can rest assured that British PC users are slightly less delinquent. A similar 1E report (PDF), released in September, says that only 16.9 per cent “never” shut down their machines. In April, we reported on the efforts of online banking firm First Direct to reduce carbon emissions by adopting software that automatically shuts off machines in the evening. The software, called NightWatchman, comes from 1E.®

Latest Comments
Anonymous Coward

new biofuel?

Im trying to get my portable generator to run on a secret mix of chip fat and squirrel tears to reduce my carbon footprint . once i find the right quantities ill be rich :) but then ill probably be invaded and have my funds frozen. :(

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Of course I leave all the office PCs on at night!

It improves the BitTorrent throughput dunnit!!

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Interesting thread - s'wot I do....

I leave mine on but turn the 2 monotors off because we run a 24 x 6-and-a-bit newspaper printing business. I'm on 24x7x365 remote support and need access to my PC cos its already got most of what I need running on it, but the office users turn their PCs off overnight and we use a NAS for file storage that gets full backup over night to one of 2 500GB removable HDDs - more space than tape, faster than tape, and SOOOO much CHEAPER!. RAS/VPN and RDP sessions do not a monitor need. Turn it off when you go home. Use Wake-on-LAN if you have to.

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Anonymous Coward

Title

"Next time you leave the office, turn off your machine. According to a new report, the typical mid-sized American business wastes more than $165,000 a year in electricity costs thanks to PCs left on through the night"

Don't panic. I've worked out why it costs so much a year for the american people leaving the PC on.

Webster Freaky unknowingly highlited the problem when he said...

"The Apple and Mac morons in Stupertino USA have BRAGGED for decades that Macs should be left on 24/7/365."

It's the lenght of the american year. With there being 24 hours a day, 7days a week and 365 weeks a year. To compare to a normal (52 week) year divide the numbers by 7.01

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RE: SSH

"What would be nice is some way to make the machine run in much lower power mode - a bit like suspend-to-ram for a desktop pc, but with the ability to wake on remote login, or cron."

You mean ACPI Power State 3? and Wake-On-LAN tech? That's available and I use it on daily basis...

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