Leaving PCs on overnight costs companies $2.8B a year
Even during an economic meltdown, when companies are scrambling to cut costs, businesses are wasting billions of dollars by leaving their PCs on at night.
U.S. organizations squander $2.8 billion a year to power unused machines, emitting about 20 million tons of carbon dioxide — roughly the equivalent of 4 million cars — according to a report to be released Wednesday.
About half of 108 million office PCs in the USA are not properly shut down at night, says the 2009 PC Energy Report, produced by 1E, an energy-management software company, and the non-profit Alliance to Save Energy. The report analyzed workplace PC power consumption in the USA, United Kingdom and Germany.
Wastefulness does not just affect a company’s bottom line, it creates environmental concerns, the report says. If the world’s 1 billion PCs were powered down just one night, it would save enough energy to light the Empire State Building — inside and out — for over 30 years, it says.
“Workers do not feel responsible for electricity bills at work, and some companies insist PCs remain on at night so they can be patched with software updates,” says 1E CEO Sumir Karayi. He says 63% of employees surveyed said their companies should take more steps to save PC power.
March 26th, 2009 at 5:58 am
I work for a small company of 9 people. We have 17 computers and I’m the only who shuts mine down when I go home. I’ve printed this article and left it on the owners desk.
March 26th, 2009 at 6:22 am
This article only slightly points at one reason why they are left “on”.
I work as a Network Admin and let me tell you. If we didn’t push out software patches overnight then that would turn into reduced downtime and PCs rebooting randomly on people during the day. A week of that and they would change policy back in a heartbeat.
Second is not only do computers update overnight but overnight is the best time to run ALL maintenance things on the PC. Virus scans can kill the performance of the computer and same thing; if you were to do that during business hours then everyone would complain. This category also covers stuff like system defrags and other maintenance pieces that cannot even run if someone is using the system.
Third is of course system updates/upgrades. You cannot run those during business hours for the same reasons you cannot run the other stuff during business hours.
Fifth and last is that in a “corporate” environment, computers act WAY different than they do at your house. When a computer turns on/off there is a lot of background things that happen and in a lot of situations you have business where everyone gets there at say 8:00am. Well if you have 200 people turning on their computer at the same time at 8:00am then is what you get is a situation where the network will be overtaxed with both computers turning on AND people logging in. What will end up happening is that people will be waiting up to 15 minutes or more (many factors to take into account) before they can even use their computer which again is lost time.
What this report will never be able to show you is the cost of the downtime you would have during business hours and what that costs your company when you do NOT do these things overnight.
When you don’t update/upgrade/patch computers and fail to do things like run virus/spyware scans then you put the computer further at risk every day. There is so much to be said about viruses etc. and how they can effect your business and network infrastructure and even legal battles with settlements for stolen information etc. But generally if a computer needs to be reimaged because of any of the above then that’s easily another 2 hours of downtime and IT resources that could be spent working on more important things.
Thanks,
TGC
April 27th, 2009 at 9:53 am
I hope ‘Don’ comes back here to read why, in a corporate environment, it is essential to leave your machine on over night.