I fell for a stupid article and turned off my home PC last night. The article says that Americans who leave computers on overnight are wasting $2.8 billion on energy costs per year.
It ignores the cost of turning computers off — and having to turn them on again the next morning. Let’s say that process takes five minutes per day, and one does it 250 days per year. That’s 1,250 minutes, or more than 20 hours per person per year.
Assume the average computer user’s wage is $21 per hour, and take the old estimate that time is valued at one-third of the wage. So each person’s time per year turning his/her computer off and on is worth 20 x $7 = $140. I’m being conservative and assuming only 50 million U.S. computer users. That gives a cost of turning computers off/on of 50,000,000 x $140 = $7 billion, which is 2.5 times the alleged savings from turning computers off. Even if people’s time were valued at only $3 per hour (less than half the minimum wage), leaving computers on would still make sense.
This story is yet another example of environmental savings uber alles — that saving $1 in environmental damage is worth much greater costs incurred along other dimensions. These stories assume explicitly — or, more usually, implicitly — that people’s time has no value.
But time has value because it has an opportunity cost. Stories like this and exhortations for environmental do-goodism hurt the environmental movement, because in the end, people realize that heeding these exhortations would actually waste resources (even though some, like me, take a day to catch on!).
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I’m sorry but your response is simply an arguement that the poor have a greater obligation to environmentalism then you because ‘your’ time is so valuable.
5min is just a strawman agrument to make your point.
If you were refering to a laptop you would think it was crazy to leave it on because the battery would be drained.
Like free street parking the cost of electrons though the wall is greatly subsidized and your calculations obsure the real cost of energy consumption without any work output.
What is the opprotunity cost of energy used without work being done?
I’m sorry is your time to valuable?
I hope no one falls for YOUR data! I make no money at home, so turning that PC on/off costs me nothing. In fact, the chime that signals that it’s booting up tells my son his bedtime is near, so the act has actual value. At work each morning I badly need the 2-3 minute boot-up time to unpack my bag, tend to the coffee pot, shuffle papers on my desk, etc. And, in a repeat of the time-management benefit of the home PC, knowing that i have only 2-3 minutes before my work PC is ready to deliver the morning dump of junk email forces me to move through my other chores quickly, so again the on/off ritual has a very real efficiency benefit, which I could probably quantify economically if I were sure I were going to live to be 1,000 and could thus spare the time for that. In short, just as dubious studies of the time people “waste” on NCAA office pools suggest that all economic activity must come to a standstill, when in fact the break probably increases productivity, so too does the time “wasted” on turning PCs on/off prove illusory. But the savings in electricity are extremely real, as is the benefit to the global community in not allowing your machine(s) to be hacked, turned into zombie spammers, at least during the off time(s).
I think it would be just as bad to “fall for” this article.
5 minutes is quite the exaggeration. If it takes that long, you certainly are wasting a lot of your time on such a slow computer! Save yourself the “value” of your time and invest in a faster computer with a hibernate feature (aka any computer made since 2000). This allows you to do a quick start-up and shut-down, each taking about 30 seconds.
I second what others have said. During the computer shutdown/startup process at work, I’m often busy taking my motorcycle riding gear on and off anyways.
Besides, if you use the hibernate mode in most modern laptops, both the startup and shutdown take very little time.
If you’re going to do a complete analysis, you should account for the additional wear and tear on your HD, spinning needlessly all night long. That will certainly hasten the day that it dies and needs to be replaced.
Hibernate, duh. That saves the time consuming part of a reboot (i.e. getting the apps and files you need opened and arranged just the way you like them).
You should do a cleansing reboot once a week or so, especially if you run windows.
I actually do not do much while my computer is booting up or shutting down. As a web developer, it’s my primary means of work.
I’m sorry, but saying that people’s time is too valuable to waste it turning computers on and off doesn’t make sense at all. Are you really trading 5 minutes of “making money” for 5 minutes of sitting by the computer per day?
Even if that all-too-academic thought were true, would you use the money you’d be making to do something for the environment?