Should I shut down my iMac at night?

Question

Level 1

74 points

Should I shut down my iMac at night?

I never turn off my iMac. But now with all of the green environmental awareness and escalating price of electricity I wonder if I should regularly turn it off. In the past I remember being told that turning off and on ages the computer more rapidly and makes the chance of a part failure more likely. I also wonder how much I'll save on my electric bill by shutting down for around ten hours a day versus having it in the sleep mode for those ten hours.

iMac G5 Intel, Mac OS X (10.4.9), 20" model, 1.5 GB memory

Posted on Jul 23, 2008 3:12 PM

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Answer 1

Jul 23, 2008 3:53 PM in response to BluSky

Hello BluSky:

You will, I am sure, get differing opinions. I never shut my iMacs down unless I am leaving town for several days. I always put them to sleep. The Macs draw very little power while they are fully asleep.

I come from the school that feels that repetitive on/off of electronics shortens the mean time to failure. (not scientific, let me hasten to say).

Barry

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Answer 2

den.thed

Level 10

82,420 points

Jul 23, 2008 4:30 PM in response to BluSky

Hi BluSky

I'll have to side with Berry here!

Not only for the ware & tare, but starting up takes more energy than just sleeping for hours???

Switching a few incandescent light bulbs to CFC bulbs will probably save you more in the long run!

Dennis

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Answer 3

elmac

Level 5

4,252 points

Jul 23, 2008 7:38 PM in response to Barry Hemphill

Hi, you have the best advice from the other posters, just to let you kno' when I worked for CompUSA all the macs where on 24/7 - just screensavers.
My macs are never Off, just sleeping or SS... My iPhone is on 24/7 just rebooted once each week for the benefit of AT&T. L

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Answer 4

Jul 23, 2008 9:21 PM in response to BluSky

I leave mine on all the time as well. One thing you can do is set the display to sleep sooner like after 15 minutes or less and either disable the screen saver or set it to a screen saver that does not take up much process. Most 3D screen savers use a lot of CPU power unnecessarily creating more heat and using more electricity when you are away from the computer.

George

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Answer 5

musashi88

Level 2

456 points

Jul 24, 2008 9:31 AM in response to BluSky

Hi BluSky
Hate to be the differing voice here but I shut down every night. My iMac, modem and printer are connected to my powerbar. Since I've shut down each night I've seen a $15/month drop in my electricity bill. Think about it, 8 hours of sleep per night times 30 days. The only thing I've had to do to compensate is the maintenance scripts. I use OnyX to run them manually.

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