When I worked as a consultant at Bell Labs in NJ, I noticed the engineers on the project left the computers on all night but put the displays to sleep without turning them off. This was really high-end experimental equipment, and the technical scopes, etc.

I asked them about burning out the equipment and the waste of electricity. They said two things.

(1) The surge of turning the equipment on and off every day was what damaged equipment. Like a car battery spark. The surge hit the electronics with 250W - 500W depending on the item, no matter what the low wattage to run it said. This level is maintained until the equipment was fully operative. They told me it was the fastest way to destroy your equipment. And I was ordered not to turn the equipment off, ever, since i worked on some of the equipment when they weren't there.

(2) They said it was more economical to leave the computers/equipment on. I didn't believe it, and they took out their calculators and showed me with a complex formula that measured two years worth of electricity.

I am not an electrical engineer. But some of these guys were. The rest were various hardware engineers. They told me no pro would turn his equipment off every night unless he lived in a tornado area without an APS surge protector.