Ecofanatics will be angry at this, but the only thing power saving and water saving does if you can afford it is increasing the price for one unit of electricity/water. Does the costs of the production, transport, material and labor costs of electricity decrease by lower consumption ? No. You will still need to pay the people who fix the power lines or pipes, pay the people who are working at power plants or pump and cleaning stations, you will still need to pay for coal or uranium in power plants, for various cleaning chemicals in water cleaning plants, etc. So all you get for 10% reduction of consumption of a country in electricity is roughly 10% increase in price of electricity.
OK what I can remember from my electrical engineering days …... Excluding accidental physical damage the most harm you can do to an electrical device is turn it on, “why?” you ask well when your pc is off it is simply a pile of scrap metal/silicon etc. when you press the on button you suddenly bang loads of electrons all over the place, then things settle down and you have a computer, imagine if you were in bed in very deep sleep and then in the blink of an eye you found yourself running down the road as fast as you can, I think you might find this somewhat stressful and detrimental to your health as dose any electrical device. My advice for desktops has always been leave it on if you think you will use it again during the day, if you are just a surfer/word-processor turn it off at night, if you run software like FAH or maybe stress analysis software or maybe an Auto-desk render program then leave it on. As for servers they take a long time to boot and this forum would not work very well if its server was turned off at night, remember it would only be a pile of scrap metal/silicon etc. and not a server. As for the green argument, I do lots and it dose not affect my lifestyle one bit, it has saved me money in fact recycling all the empty beer cans from my home brings in enough money to buy a nice Christmas dinner once a year.
My PC is only on when I am using it. If I left it on all day then my kids would have a whispering blue glow to go for. No thanks. Do energy save where possible. Bulbs, boiler, TV, etc. Do not go made though. £8-10000 for 12 Solar panels that will take 12-15 years (if your lucky) to recoup the cost. Don't have the money to take that kind of hit.
Mine are on 24/7 generally doing something or other, not had any issues caused by it. Just make sure you give them an internal dust once in a while to clean the dust filters, I hadn't done mine for a good year or so and found an entire layer of dust blocking the front of the heatsink, so my CPU fan was effectively doing nothing. Clearing that dropped the CPU load temperature by 25c
My main pc for gaming and reading goes on and off everyday, my storage pc is on most the time for strwaming and seeding but it also heats the room enough if on long enough that I turn radiator off (gas fire downstairs) so not wasting money heating house. I try to be green, all downstairs appliances that can be turned off and on 1 set of plugs so can be fully turned off, same for certain PC equipment (speakers, monitors etc) I hope it helps, but I doubt anyone cares
I always switch my PC off. Even if I pop away for a hour or so to watch TV or make a cake. I get worried leaving computers switched on by themselves. It just gives them time to become self-aware.
I only leave my fridge/freezer, alarm clocks and Tivo on 24/7..... everything else gets switched off/unplugged when not in use. My utility bills have dropped massively.
I have a bio-mass converter generator in the shed so as long as there's a fresh supply of baby deer I'm okay. Sometimes when the lights flicker I'll send the butler downstairs with a cattle prod to motivate the human treadmills. And even though I've made the area into a no-fly zone with my solar farm in the back garden, altogether it's enough for me to leave all the things on all the time.
The posts surrounding where your energy comes from are redundant at least in the UK. Saying all the electricity you use is Nuclear powered therefore it is ok to waste it as it renewable is not actually the case. In the UK at least we have the national grid. The national grids purpose is to be able to route the electricity generated to where it is needed. In short if you weren't wasting that nuclear energy is could be routed elsewhere (via the national grid) to regions which are normally powered by coal etc to reduce the use of non-renewable resources. So in fact while you are using Nuclear energy you are still contributing to global warming by reducing the energy available from nuclear power stations to the rest of the country. I'm not at all saying people shouldn't leave PC's on etc, I'm just saying "the my energy comes from renewable sources" argument doesn't carry any weight unless you are from a country solely powered by renewable resources. I used to leave my PC on most of the time, nowadays I turn everything off bar the server which is on for all my tasks 24/7 (uploading, downloading, distribution to clients, auto-mated backups and remote access to music etc). I personally, server included have all my drives power down after 10 minutes of inactivity and I'm still running drives from 2001, so the whole issue regarding rebooting/powering down and drive issues hasn't affected me.
Never turned my PC off, except for mandatory Windows 7 updates (reboot). Don't see any reason to keep turning it on and off. My power bill isn't all that bad, and my PC is usually doing *something* all the time. With the HDD's spun down, and the power sipping SSD doing the bulk of the work anyway, I don't see it drawing much power. Replacing my incandescent bulbs with new compact fluorescent or LED saw a drop in the bill. A normal light fixture in the living room used to draw 60 watt x 4 on its own.
