On 2/28/10 8:16 PM, Austin Leeds wrote:
Some people say it's wasteful—leaving a computer on at night sucks up electricity. Personally, I find that my Pismo uses only about 1% of its battery life per night (with two somewhat used 6.6 Ah batteries topping off at a total of 10.7 Ah). Doesn't seem like much to me, and I'm pretty sure having our iMac G4 sleeping through the night doesn't make more than a nano-nick on our electrical bill. I notice more usage than that starting the Pismo up on batteries, usually around 2-3%. Guess that kills that argument. Anyway, the longest uptimes I've seen around here are the one-week sessions we have with our iMac G4, before it is booted into Mac OS 9 or accidentally turned off or something. My Pismo has gone roughly as long… However, the longest uptimes I've seen reported for Mac computers (not counting the several hundreds of days servers can run) are between 36 and 45 days for some PPC Power Macs. I'm going to try leaving my Pismo on (asleep at night) for as long as I possibly can, just out of curiosity. I'll post in five day intervals initially. Anybody else have some unbelievable uptime stories?
My MacBook Pro is usually running (including periods of sleep) for months at a time. The usual reason for it to be restarted is a software update.
You are right, laptops when sleeping draw a tiny amount of power. I'd have to do the math to be accurate but I'd suspect you would have to leave a laptop asleep for somewhere between a week and a month to use as much energy as you would starting the computer up.
Desktops are a different matter. I've measured power on various Macs. As an example an iMac G3 draws 93 watts running and 37 watts on standby. That seems typical for PPC models. Yes, they do save power on sleep but not THAT much. An Intel iMac on the other hand only draws about 1 watt when sleeping (I don't have the running power). Note that the same machine draws the same amount of power when off, so in that case it truly saves power to let it sleep, no wasted time booting up.
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