I'm in the market for a new computer right now, so I've been doing a bit of research. While looking around, I ran into this page about computers on the ENERGY STAR website. I thought I'd share!
I had a little fun with the table at the bottom of the "Overview" tab, which talked about how much money you'd save if you activated power management tools on your computer. It's not the most detailed chart, and I wish I knew where their actual data was so I could look at it… But at its heart, it appears to say that if you leave your computer on every night and weekend and started using power management, you'd save $20 a year in energy costs over the 4 year life of a computer (assuming that you pay about $.11 a kilowatt hour.)
That's not a ton of money, sure. But it's something. It made me wonder about how I treat my computer, which is not extremely well.
I turn it off every night, yes. But I turn it on the minute I get up and leave it on until I go to bed. I put my computer in Sleep mode when I go out. But if I'm at home, I usually forget to do so. And while I turn my monitor entirely off before I go to bed—rather than letting it sleep—I almost never do when I'm awake.
Basically, I am being completely silly about my computer. It's time for me to turn on power management! It's not like it takes all that much time to wake up. And it's totally ridiculous to leave the thing on, full-blast and full-power, when I'm not even using it.
How do all of you treat your computers? Do you use power management settings?
E-mail your responses to the Energy Saver team at consumer.webmaster@nrel.gov.