A typical office PC is busy for eight or nine hours a day. For the other fifteen or sixteen, plus weekends, it often sits running at full idle with the monitor glowing, doing nothing useful. Multiply that by every desk in the building and it adds up on the power bill, and in heat your building has to deal with.
For Alaska offices watching their power bills, it is worth getting right. The good news is that it is mostly a matter of settings, not new equipment.
What an idle PC is really costing
ENERGY STAR, the U.S. government energy-efficiency program, gives an example (published February 2024 and still its current guidance as of September 2026) of an office with 400 employees, each with a desktop or laptop plus an extra monitor. Turning off power management on all of that equipment, it says, could add over $9,400 a year to the electricity bill, “with no added value.”
The program itself is in transition: in 2026 the EPA and the Department of Energy finalized a plan to move its management to the Department of Energy. The advice on power management does not depend on which agency runs it.
Your own numbers depend on your equipment and your utility rate. To estimate them, you need three things:
- How much power a PC and monitor draw while idle, in watts. A plug-in power meter will tell you, or the manufacturer’s specifications.
- How many hours a week they sit idle when no one is using them.
- Your electricity rate per kilowatt-hour, from your utility bill.
Multiply watts by idle hours, divide by 1,000 to get kilowatt-hours, and multiply by your rate. Do that for one desk, then multiply by the number of desks. It is a quick exercise, and it turns a vague good intention into a budget line.
The objection: “But updates install overnight”
This is the main reason offices leave PCs running, and it is a fair one. Microsoft releases its monthly security updates on the second Tuesday of each month, according to its update release documentation, typically at 10 a.m. Pacific Time, and nobody wants those installing in the middle of the workday. Overnight is the natural time to install and restart.
ENERGY STAR addresses this directly. It says there is no longer a technical reason to disable power management on modern systems, because features like Wake-on-LAN (a network signal that wakes a sleeping PC) let administrators wake machines to receive updates and then let them go back to sleep.
Restarts are also becoming less frequent for some offices. As of September 2026, Microsoft offers hotpatch updates, security fixes that take effect without a restart, on eligible Windows 11 devices with certain business licenses and Microsoft’s cloud management. Even then, a restart is still needed each quarter for a “baseline” update, so a maintenance window remains useful.
So the choice is not “save power” or “stay patched.” With the right setup, you get both.
A practical power policy
- Turn on sleep for idle PCs and monitors. Set displays to sleep after a short idle period and computers after a somewhat longer one. This saves power during the day too: lunch breaks, meetings, people out of the office.
- Shut down or sleep at night, on a schedule. Ask staff to save their work and log out at the end of the day. A scheduled shutdown or sleep catches the machines people forget.
- Set a maintenance window for updates. Pick one or two nights a week, timed after new patches have been held and tested, when PCs are woken to install them and restart. Outside that window, they stay off or asleep.
- Enable Wake-on-LAN where it is supported. This is a setting in the PC’s firmware and network adapter. Once it is on, a management system can wake machines remotely for updates or support.
- Keep the exceptions short and deliberate. Servers, phone systems, network equipment and any PC that must be reached remotely stay on. Everyone else follows the policy.
- Check that it works. Look at which machines actually slept, woke and patched. A policy nobody verifies tends to drift.
The environmental side
Less wasted electricity means less fuel burned to generate it, less heat for your building to remove, and less wear on fans and power supplies. It is one of the easier sustainability steps an office can take, and it pays for itself instead of costing money.
How FTI helps
With our managed IT service, power and update schedules work together. Our Kaseya platform can apply power settings across your PCs, and our patching process schedules updates into a maintenance window so machines are awake when they need to be and off when they do not. Our monitoring, with AI assisting our engineers, flags PCs that missed their window or are missing updates, whatever the reason, so someone follows up.
If you are replacing PCs soon, it is also worth asking whether some desks could use thin clients instead. We cover that in thin clients with Windows RDS.
