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Do you leave your Mini on at night?
- Thread starter Saberon2014
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I have electric heating in my apartment so most of the year it doesn't matter if that heat comes from machines or radiators. It seems I must be in the minority since many advocate that we should turn our machines off overnight. With what do you heat your apartments or houses? Oil, coal, wood?
We all collectively share the same world and have a responsibility to look after it.
You seem to completely ignore the word essential in my comment.
So from your response it seems you regard your computer as an essential item that need to be constantly powered on in the same way as a fridge or heating in the winter?
I didn’t ignore anything. Just highlighting your hypocrisy and parochial view of the world. What is essential for you may not be essential for some. What is essential for some may not be essential for you. By your logic, MacRumors and all other sites should shut down, I mean Data centers consume way more power than a Mac mini.
One can argue running fridge 24 hrs is ineffective, they should have a timer, 3 hrs on, 3hrs off. Why do you need to heat the whole house. Get some firewood, bundle up in layers of clothes and woolen blankets.
You really want to save and preach, look at appliances which consume lot more power and eliminate them first.
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I stopped replying to "those" people........hypocrite is the word alright.
They have tunnel vision and think they are out to save the world from demise......what a joke.
Just like all the people that flock to the numerous "protests" nowadays...
Ask a bunch of those protesting what they are really protesting about and most can't even answer the question.....they have no clue why they are even there, but hey it's MY RIGHT! 😆
Being a hypocrite in what way, not turning my fridge off? The bigger issue is your thought process that a small change can’t make a significant impact because other things use up more electricity.
Its a big world and MacRumours is accessed by people outside the USA (assumption only) on data servers that host more that one website. 10am in the USA is not 10am in Japan.
???
Fridges, heating don’t run all the time and they switch on and off on demand to conserve power and make an essential household item as energy efficient as possible.
Please explain why you class any item that needlessly consumes electricity as essential when turning it off has literally zero impact to your life or how you use it?
It is indeed their right and most protesters will be very aware of what they are protesting about. There are very real issues that people are genuinely concerned about and rightly so.
No, we don’t collectively view the world same. You have no idea why some one may run Mac mini 24 hrs a day.
mac Rumors or for that matter most of social media is not essential, world will survive just fine. I don’t do social media, by your logic Facebook, IG and any product I don’t use is waste of power. They should shut those data centers down. It is not essential to me.
Fridge usually has operating wattage and active cooling wattage. Operating range of Fridge can still be in range of 300-400 watts. That’s more than Mac mini. Not to forget it can use about 1200 Watts or more depending on the size during active cooling periods. It’s laughable that you think fridge doesn’t consume any power in maintaining the temperature.
Ignorants are usually the one preaching the world with their narrow mindset.
Nothing wrong with protesting, if you gonna follow what you preach. Problem is people take the low hanging fruit and pretend to be responsible or care about saving something. If you really want to save power, I can count 100 things before I even get to Mac mini.
Meh, mostly it’s for looking good on social media. It’s about changing profile picture to next cool cause/theme of the week. Go online and lecture people, but doesn’t wanna give up anything for the cause or what they are preaching.
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Wait a minute... people shut down their computers? I left my Mac Pro 2012 on since I got it and only ever restarted it for updates. Plan to do the same with the M2 mini.
Shutdown and lock it in the safe, it’s responsible thing to do.
It is interesting how the discussion degenerated from do you shut down your computer... to shut down the internet, save the planet, stop the waste... 😆
Look, as I said in a previous post here, I do have timers that turns off most of my non-essential things in the house by 23:00. For me personally is not something that necessarily has to do with saving the planet. Currently I'm living in the eastern Europe, really near the border of Ukraine. Since the war started, the energy cost got really high so every tiny bit of thing that consumes something, counts if you look at the end of the month. It counts up.
But that's not the entire story. I was raised in this mentality basically, when you don't use something, don't leave it running. Again, non-essentials stuff. Do you use that router when you sleep? No - turn it off. Do you use that TV when you sleep or away at work? No - turn it off (or unplug the damn thing, since you cannot turn off most of the modern TVs nowadays). Do you use your computer... when not using it? Nop - turn it off.
Again, I was raised in this way, and I cannot understand for the life of me why I don't have the physical power off button on my TV for example. Why that thing should maintain a constant Internet connection and run low-powered tasks in the background, considering that I'm only turning it on and using it actively for like... 2 to 3 hours in the evening, is beyond me.
Look, as I said in a previous post here, I do have timers that turns off most of my non-essential things in the house by 23:00. For me personally is not something that necessarily has to do with saving the planet. Currently I'm living in the eastern Europe, really near the border of Ukraine. Since the war started, the energy cost got really high so every tiny bit of thing that consumes something, counts if you look at the end of the month. It counts up.
But that's not the entire story. I was raised in this mentality basically, when you don't use something, don't leave it running. Again, non-essentials stuff. Do you use that router when you sleep? No - turn it off. Do you use that TV when you sleep or away at work? No - turn it off (or unplug the damn thing, since you cannot turn off most of the modern TVs nowadays). Do you use your computer... when not using it? Nop - turn it off.
Again, I was raised in this way, and I cannot understand for the life of me why I don't have the physical power off button on my TV for example. Why that thing should maintain a constant Internet connection and run low-powered tasks in the background, considering that I'm only turning it on and using it actively for like... 2 to 3 hours in the evening, is beyond me.
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Yes , never turned off ever
Tbh it's SO quiet and runs SO cool the only way I can tell it's on is by the light on the front !!
It's amazing , unlike THREE previous that had intel and were noisy , hot and very unreliable
Tbh it's SO quiet and runs SO cool the only way I can tell it's on is by the light on the front !!
It's amazing , unlike THREE previous that had intel and were noisy , hot and very unreliable
So, after I plugged in two external drives yesterday and observed a significant increase of power consumption while I was at work and the system sleeping, I've taken some additional measurements. I wanted to share this information with you.
Disclaimer: the measurements were taken with a Shelly plug. It's not certified for taking 100% accurate measurements, but it should give us some insights. I've ran each test for about 30 minutes to get average values, so it should be accurate enough to derive your own, personal decisions on how to handle your Mac Mini. Also, see my signature before asking me which version of the Mini
Coming back to the external drives: drive one is for Timemachine backups and is a SanDisk 480GB SATA3 SSD in a USB 3.1 Gen1 enclosure (5Gbps). Drive two is for media and is a Samsung 980 NVME M.2 500GB in a USB 3.1 Gen2 enclosure (10Gbps).
See below for the measured values for different scenarios.
Power off:
0Wh - no external drives
0Wh - 2 external drives
System sleep:
0.6Wh - no external drives
2.4Wh - 2 external drives
System idle, display on, no apps open
3Wh - no external drives
6.5Wh - 2 external drives
Remarks: watching the power consumption during sleep reveals that the system never really sleeps completely. I can see that at regular intervals the power consumption increases and the Mac Mini 'does things'. Examining the powerd logs reveals that there are regular 'Deep Wakes' of the system. Even disabling Powernap didn't change this.
It seems that putting an external SSD drive to sleep doesn't save as much energy, as I would have expected/hoped for.
Disclaimer: the measurements were taken with a Shelly plug. It's not certified for taking 100% accurate measurements, but it should give us some insights. I've ran each test for about 30 minutes to get average values, so it should be accurate enough to derive your own, personal decisions on how to handle your Mac Mini. Also, see my signature before asking me which version of the Mini
Coming back to the external drives: drive one is for Timemachine backups and is a SanDisk 480GB SATA3 SSD in a USB 3.1 Gen1 enclosure (5Gbps). Drive two is for media and is a Samsung 980 NVME M.2 500GB in a USB 3.1 Gen2 enclosure (10Gbps).
See below for the measured values for different scenarios.
Power off:
0Wh - no external drives
0Wh - 2 external drives
System sleep:
0.6Wh - no external drives
2.4Wh - 2 external drives
System idle, display on, no apps open
3Wh - no external drives
6.5Wh - 2 external drives
Remarks: watching the power consumption during sleep reveals that the system never really sleeps completely. I can see that at regular intervals the power consumption increases and the Mac Mini 'does things'. Examining the powerd logs reveals that there are regular 'Deep Wakes' of the system. Even disabling Powernap didn't change this.
It seems that putting an external SSD drive to sleep doesn't save as much energy, as I would have expected/hoped for.
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