Is it better to shut down my iMac at night or just put it to sleep?

It’s not bad for it, but you’re not going to save much energy compared to just letting it sleep.

The only time my iMac gets shut down is if I’m going to be away from it for more than a few days or if there’s a wicked storm coming in.

You will use more energy by shutting it down and starting it up every single day. Just let it sleep according to Energy Saver.

Macs work best when they are treated with benign neglect.

Sleep is an old habit from the early 2000s when power-hogging mechanical drives ruled. A habit that many can’t get rid off including many old timers here. Hello @den. It’s n/a from the time SSDs became standard i.e. about a decade ago.

If Sleeping doesn’t cause mystery problems like kernel crashes or drive disconnects, you can continue using it.

However, if discussions like these bother you and you ask yourself after manually sleeping your Mac: “Why did I just do that when I could have let the display switch itself off or have locked the screen with Control-Command-Q? Am I a stubborn old techno-dinosaur who refuses to let go?”, then get rid of the habit and pat yourself in the back for catching up with the times.

Shutting = few unmeasured watts here and there = insignificant = absolutely nothing gained or lost, no wear or tear. That bit you can do for the Climate crazies for saying you’re doing it to prevent the world from burning up. If they bring up your Apple 35 Watt charger

that runs day and night 365 days a year, just walk away. It’s none of their business.

Have fun!

I'll weigh in. My preference is to:

• Lock screen when I plan on returning to use later
• Log Out when I'm done for the day
• Reboot when anything odd is going on
• Shut Down when I'm going to be gone for a few days or weather makes loss of power likely

I find that for my needs this balances energy usage, network availability for sharing/backups/cloud/updates, convienience of being able to get back to work quickly, and keeping files and processes closed when not in active use.

+1 We sleep displays, only restart when required by an update and shut down when away for more than a full day.

I'm old school when it comes to shutting down or sleeping. I shut down at night which deletes temporary system and application swap and cache files. They can get corrupted at times and will cause strange and unwanted behavior in system or applications.

When I'm away from the computer for any time during the day I don't sleep but just let the screensaver go on and then go dark after a set time.

So now it's 3 to 1. Take your pick.

I am intrigued

Hcsitas you say,  “Sleep is unnecessary on later Macs and should be disable”.

I have an old mac but still interested to know why you suggest that.

Like Old Toad I shutdown at night for the reasons he gives but I also sleep after 10 minutes of inactivity – if I don’t use for 10 minutes that usually means hours. One advantage is that unnecassary TM backups won’t run on the external hard drives.

As for John Galt saying use more energy restarting, that depends how long ones leaves it shut down, even hours I would think you’d save. It would be more significant with platter drives but not with SSDs. That said the energy involved would be a matter of Watts and compared with other energy useage in the house would be insignificant in my estimation.

Sleep is unnecessary on later Macs and should be disabled. Shut for long absences/idle overnights (no downside whatsoever) and for regular operation use the settings exactly as shown below: (reboot after setting):

Also, do not manual-sleep for brief absences; use instead the Lock Screen settings to switch the display off on timer:

Once set, you can also use Control-Command-Q to immediately lock your screen (instead of waiting for the display to switch off on timer).

Well summarized! As far as energy, there’s absolutely nothing to be lost or gained with either option. Do what suits you best.

👍😉