How Much Does It Cost To Keep Your Computer On All The Time?

I don't know whether I am being the world's greatest brown-nosing company man in the building or if I am being the reason our computers don't work as well as they should.

I have a confession to make. I am the guy that goes around the building in the middle of the night turning off computer monitors, lamps, lights, and a certain motion activated chirping bird that drives me up the wall. I do it for one simple reason. I don't believe in wasting money.

Here at the Bruce Mikells Multi-Media Center, that's the radio station for the uninformed, we have a lot of computers and a lot of monitors that have to stay on 24 hours a day, seven days a week. If they didn't you're radio would be very quiet during the time that they were turned off. Still we have a lot of other computers and monitors that just sit and run. Some of them go into a sleep mode, some go into a power saving mode, others just fill the empty darkness with wasted light.

That got me to thinking, I wonder how much money it costs to run an average computer and monitor per day. I could then do the math and see how much money we could save by turning all of these piece of equipment off. I figured with the extra savings I could talk the management of the company into booking a Luke Bryan show for the Cajundome.

Here is what I found out. Please note my calculations are based on some speculative data and your mileage may vary, ask your doctor is these conditions persist, and don't operate heavy machinery without removing this tag first.  I think I have all the legal stuff out of the way now.

Since I couldn't find a definitive answer on whether it's a good idea to power down or leave your PC on all night, I figured I could at least save some money with turning off the computer monitors and not screw up the digital universe hear at the BMMC.

I found that an average monitor with a white background uses about $4.10 in electricity every year. If you break that down by the day it's about .027 cents. Let's assume the monitors I am turning off or not necessary for the radio station to stay on the air and we can shut them down from 6pm to 6am every night. That is half a day so each monitor cost .014 cents to operate during that down time.

I did a quick audit of the disc jockey side of the  building and we have 40 monitors operating either at full power or idle power during that time. For the sake of argument let's say they are all costing .014 cents time 40 and that equals $0.56. If you look at that over the course of a year that's $204.40 in money that is vanishing in the middle of the night.

Granted I can't afford to get Luke Bryan to come to the Cajundome for a little over two hundred bucks, but I'd rather have that money in my pocket than pay it to the power company for no reason at all. I suggest you take a look at your business and home setup and see where you can save some money by powering down and turning it off when you aren't really using it.