I’m going to let you in on a secret: I don’t really shut down my computer. When I’m done with my workday, I usually just unplug my laptop and close the lid. I think most people do this.
Shutting off your computer every night has downsides. If you just put your computer to sleep, everything is right where you left it in the morning. But if you shut down, you need to wait for your computer to boot up and then re-open all of your applications and documents. It’s annoying.
A lot of annoying things can save you energy, though, and it’s worth thinking about that from an environmental and economic standpoint. Would shutting down your computer help you save energy and money? I wanted to find out.
A sleeping computer doesn’t use much energy
It’s easy to put your computer to sleep: on a laptop, you just need to close the lid. Windows offers the feature in the start menu, macOS offers it in the menu bar, and both operating systems automatically put computers to sleep after a certain amount of time by default. If you’re not using your device as a server, there is no reason to change this.
But what does it mean for a computer to be “asleep”? It basically means that the computer isn’t actively working on anything and power is only used to keep the RAM, or memory, from losing power. The RAM is where your computer stores your open applications, documents, and browsing tabs, and keeping that running doesn’t use a lot of power.
I wanted to get an idea of just how little power so I ran a few simple tests. First, I charged my laptop around 6PM after an afternoon of using it outside. In that time, it was just about fully charged, after which I unplugged it and closed the lid. The charge in my laptop barely went down—only by one percent—and this is on a nearly six year old laptop with a battery that doesn’t hold a charge like it used to.
I wanted a slightly more precise number, though, so I used a Kill A Watt to…
Read the full article here