Why You Should NOT Shut Down Your PC

If your time is worth more than $1.91/hr you're losing money shutting down your PC each night

Back in the stone ages I remember reading about this in PC Magazine. Since time is money, wasting time each day switching tasks and restarting applications is costing you hundreds or thousands a year. It's even more true today, with reduced power consumption and laptop/tablets being more commonplace. Run the numbers for yourself, all you need is a little data:

C_kWh =Cost / kilowatt hour. Check your bill. In my case its $.127/kWh, yours is similar.
P_kWatts = Hourly power consumption in kilowatts. We're not counting monitors: these are easy to turn off. Most PC power supplies are .6kw's, but you aren't capping them out 24/7. My power supply is 1kw but everything isn't running at 100% when you're away at night unless you just like running infinite loops while you sleep. .350 is a safe estimate for me, probably .250-.3 for average users.
T_AFK = Hours away from keyboard between the time you stop working and when you come back to the office. For me, 12.
H_End = Hours you spend saving, closing programs, "getting ready to shut down tonight" etc. Could do minutes but lets not complicate things. I'll say .1.
H_Start = Hours it takes you to get restarted every day. Here is where it adds up:

• Unless you have a solid state drive you're looking at 3-5 minutes for a full boot (BIOS, windows loading, logging in, and waiting for all your junk to start up).
• You have to remember where you were, and manually re-open each program and the files within it (also carries a small risk of data loss).
• Open cloud services, log in, etc.
• "Checking" things like email, Skype, BHW, PayPal, etc. that you normally have open all day. Each usually requires a login.

You're spending a serious amount of time here. I'll say .18 hours here for myself, but that is probably far too low.

Now crunch the numbers:

C_kWh*P_kWatts * T_AFK = Total cost of running your PC all night

C_kWh*P_kWatts * T_AFK / (H_{End +} H_Start) = Hourly earning rate where its no longer worth it to shut down.

$.127 * .350 * 12/ (.1 + .18) = $1.91/hr

Of course these numbers are further compounded if you have employees. Remember this next time the wife gets mad for 'wasting money' ^_^