I use watt when I want to compare power, and watt*hour when dealing with energy. Hours because hours are a lot closer to the real spans of time I use, and therefore much easier to calculate with. E.g. it's more common to run a 3kW AC for 3h than 3s. So, 9 kWh instead of 9 kWs (or 180kWs, for the same time span)

> If you're going to multiply by the electricity cost anyway

I don't usually convert to money. If it's a linear cost per kWh, then I can deal with that at the end or, more likely, don't actually really care.

The _actual_ cost you pay is often tiered anyway, so who knows what the price _actually_ is until you have the whole month's worth of power usage finalized. And then it's not clear what I could account to what tier.

> might as well break out the calculator one step early.

Bold to assume I use a calculator much.

Yeah exactly, I didn't even need to take time into account, I was looking for the upper bound presuming it's always on with a simple Wattage comparison.

But that was mostly because that workstation, albeit lovely, had a very long boot process.

The ThinkCentre boots in under a minute, so I actually end up only booting it when needed.

(Some of my work can be done offline, and I jump at every opportunity to `halt -p` and be in the quiet offline space/state.)