Gear preservation? Leaving gear on?

First post so I hope Im in the right category, I often see folks in videos with every piece of gear in their studio on and I wonder if they are not worried it will put stress on the gear and wear its life out for nothing? Im also not sure if it is better to turn gear off if I am to take a break or if its better to leave it going than turning it on and off.

How many of you have fancy circuit filters or surge protection? If I have a digital circuit breaker in my apartment should I be safe or do I need a filter? I am very curious what people here who really know their electronics think. I want my gear to last forever.

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You lost…

I don’t think (yeah, that’s just think, not know) modern gear suffer much from being turned on and off. Just don’t do it several times an hour.
But leaving it on will keep it “at temperature”, and that can help keep everything in tune (obviously this only apply to instruments, mixers and such don’t go out of of tune (at least I hope so !))

As for filters/etc, it really depends on the quality of the electrical network near your home.
I don’t have anything beside the 30+ years old circuit breaker and run my vintage computers on that without problems, nor fear…
If I had flickering lights, or other signs of “bad” power, I’d probably invest in something (never looked at what exists, hence the slightly vague term something).

I learned recently OLED burn in is a thing, so if you have something with an OLED screen it’s best not to have it on when not needed. (My two module designs using OLEDs now have software timeouts that blank the screen after a minute of no controls usage.)

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I have lost more electronics to “dirty power” than I would care to admit. If you are really worried I would invest in a Uninterruptable Power Supply.

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Turning off/on leads to cooling/heating in the circutis and has inrush current implications. In my world of I.T. Infrastrucutre any cooling to a cold startup is a risk, keeping stuff warm is ok but hot reduces the risk. That’s why every metal box is on 24/7/365 … ££££ and not good for the penguins.

Similar risks exist at home, but the cost of a failure run it to £100’s of personal £’s not £100K’s of corporatre £’s

Your paying for the electricity , it’s an intangiable balance between keeping it hot and saving the penguines… There is also a small fire risk.

I’m not mr Green, I am a fire marshal, I have previously been an electrical tester, I worry about kit… My synths get turned off as they hardly get used.

I do have my own UPS’s but that’s only for extreemly rare power failure and only to cover my home servers and SAN.

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Gotta say thanks! It didn’t take long to get a pretty wide assortment of good advice! Seems like an awesome forum!

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Many electronic components have a low-power mode. The reasons for this can be conserving battery power (microcontrollers) or keeping an appliance in a semi-hot state in order to reduce the stress caused by a sudden inrush of current when the equipment is cold. Some network cards have a feature that can be used to remotely start the host machine by sending a signal to the card.

So this is a question with a complex answer. You would need to investigate what features exist in the system, and how they can be used in a way that maximizes your performance needs while saving money on power consumption and failure risk.

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