How can I persuade colleagues to turn their computers off when leaving the office?

Question

Most of my colleagues leave their laptops on when they go home - even over the weekends. I regard this as a colossal waste of electricity, especially when we have a public holiday coming up next Monday (May Bank Holiday in Ireland and the UK).

I've been holding my tongue about this for a while, but I do know that I'm not the only person in the office who has a problem with this. So, how can I persuade them to stop doing this?

Update A few things that came up in the comments:

• There is an office/facility administrator, but I don't think I've ever received an email specifically about this from them. The most I've ever heard is "the entire power will be shut down this weekend for maintenance purposes".
• Some of my colleagues occasionally need to run things overnight, which I don't have a problem with. Some of them appear to use this to work remotely, though it is possible to just bring the laptop home and access the network via VPN.
• I don't think the computers go into hibernation - it looks like they just log out. That said, they don't take too long to boot up now that we have SSDs - maybe a minute or two.

Answer 1

I regard this as a colossal waste of electricity

It's probably not as bad as you think - unless they have been specifically setup otherwise most modern laptops proactively reduce power consumption during periods of inactivity anyway. Turning off the screen, throttling the CPU/GPU, powering down any spinning rust etc. I've seen consumption figures as low as 2 watts for laptops in this state! Many will automatically enter "Sleep" mode after a certain time, and potentially even hibernation - sleep mode vastly reduces the power consumption. Most modern laptops running Win10 will use so-called "hybrid sleep" where the machine will initially enter the equivalent of the ACPI standby mode and then will hibernate if the machine remains in sleep for 3 hours or more.

So it may be the case that your colleagues are 1) oblivious to the power usage when they aren't there 2) don't care about it or 3) may actually know more than you do.

So any attempt to "stop [them] doing this" will need to address these possibilities.

1. If they are oblivious then a reminder e-mail from the office administrator might do the trick.

2. If they don't care you aren't going to make them care, so unless you have the necessary authority to either take punitive action against those who don't comply or reward those that do you aren't going to get anywhere.

Before we get on to point three.. looking at the language in your post: "I regard...", "I don't think the computers go into hibernation", "looks like they just log out" I get the distinct impression that you're a little light on actual facts here. Call me old fashioned but I don't think that's the best place to start from if you're looking to persuade people to change their stances or behavior so..

3. Take some time to actually learn about what (if any) power management strategy is in place on these machines that are being "left on" - if they modern laptops running Windows 10 with the default settings then you're basically already at the optimum trade off point for most scenarios where the desire is to balance minimizing the time taken to resume producivity in the morning vs reduce power consumption.

It's point three that really brings me to my proposed solution - learn about the power management settings that are in place on these laptops and if necessary approach IT support about getting it changed.

Answer 2

The best way to have this happen is to show a benefit to the company.

In this answer, https://superuser.com/questions/1103136/windows-10-desktop-does-sleep-mode-use-a-lot-of-energy the power usage per year is about $15 with a high cost of power. So if the there are 10 computers that are running the potential saving is about $150 per year.

If you believe that this saving is worth your time, and administration's time to create a policy and police it, then put together a short presentation/paper and present it to management.

I would expect it to fail because the cost of the meeting would exceed an entire year's saving, and the cost of policing such a policy would would be too expensive and anger too many users that it is just not worth it.

Answer 3

Office admin would look after these issues as it's in their job description.

You can just convey your concern and check if the administrator knows about it.

Most laptops would go to sleep if there is no activity. If there is some activity then the laptop might be left unsecured and can be misused over the weekend. I am no IT expert but I guess you can also convey your concern to IT admin as well.

Answer 4

If you are concerned with saving electricity at the office, then the power consumed by a few laptops being left on overnight is nowhere near the amount of energy consumed by the office's air conditioning and/or heating system running while nobody is at the office.

Regardless, the best person to address your concerns with is the office administrator. It is their job to manage such matters.

Answer 5

In my department all of us (7) leave their PC on during the night. The reason is, that we do not want to start all the programs again, when coming to work.

EDIT: My point is, you cannot make me switch off my computer, unless you have power over me. If you want to change this, you have to talk to my supervisor.

Answer 6

The average draw of a laptop running Windows with the screen illuminated in our environment is roughly 20W

Around 1W idle / screen sleeping.

This worst case 20W (obviously excluding recharging.) is 0.02KW/h or 0.48KWh/Day.

This is less than 5 cents a day per machine assuming it doesn't sleep.

If you are in a location that where a furnace provides heat. this is a wash, as your heating bill will drop by 5 cents.

If you are in a location where an A/C unit runs, you can add another 25% to the tab as the AC will work harder to cool the room. ~6 cents.

If you make $10/hr that is = to 17 cents a minute, or about 19 seconds of your time. If you make $20/hr ~10 seconds If you make $30/hr ~6 seconds. etc...

If you are worried about this power consumption, You may also want to worry about arriving 3 seconds late, and leaving 3 seconds early.

Answer 7

Some points: My computer is none of your business. Touch it at your own peril; it would make me very angry, and you don’t want that. If my computer is turned on and running then it is turned on and running for a good reason. If I waste five minutes of my time turning on my computer that costs the company ten times more than you can ever save. Same if I waste five minutes of my life discussing this with you. I’d make a mental note that you are a busybody and jobsworth.

Summary: don’t do it.