How to Withdraw STEEM POWER
Withdrawing STEEM POWER from your steemit.com account requires you to initiate a process so called Power Down that starts converting your STEEM POWER to STEEM tokens that you can transfer to other users or withdraw and sell. When you initiate a Power Down your current STEEM POWER will start to get converted in 104 equal parts and each of these parts will be available to you in the form of STEEM.
The first portion of STEEM will be available in your Wallet after exactly one week, then in another week you will get the second part of the 104 and so on with the process taking up 2 years or 104 weeks to complete. At any time you are able to Cancel Power Down from your Wallet the same way you initiated it, but the advice is to stop it once you have been paid one of the 104 installments.
Why Would You Cancel Power Down
The answer is pretty simple, once you initiate a Power Down your current STEEM POWER is taken into account and divided in 104 parts and each week you will be getting 1/104th. However your STEEM POWER will continue to grow as you will most likely continue to use the website and there is also another way that it also grows by itself - STEEM POWER has an interest rate, so you earn more by just holding it.
So after you get a weekly payment you can Cancel Power Down and then right after that initiate Power Down again from your wallet in order to take into account the new amount of STEEM POWER you already have accumulated in your account...
Initiate a Power Down Now and Keep It On
You are probably not aware of the fact that no matter how much STEEM POWER you have in your account the interest it generates for a week will always be more than 1/104th of your holdings that will be converted from STEEM POWER to STEEM if you Power Down. You can get an estimate on the interest rate and how much will you be earning and what is the Power Down installment for your account with the help of the website SteemStats.com, all you have to do is enter your steemit.com username and go to the Steem Power tab.
So you earn more interest on your STEEM POWER in a week than you will get back as STEEM tokens on a weekly basis when you initiate a Power Down. This means that even in a Power Down mode you are still increasing your STEEM POWER over time and thanks to getting back a portion back in the form of the liquid STEEM token in your wallet you would be able to do more and be more flexible.
The conclusion is that you can be in a constant Power Down mode without losing anything from it, it can just slow down a bit the growth of your STEEM POWER, but you will be more flexible as you will also have some liquid STEEM tokens. Of course once you get back STEEM tokens you can at any time use them to Power Up and thus convert them back to STEEM POWER. Just don't forget to do a Cancel Power Down from time to time after you get a payment and reinitiate Power Down right after that in order to take into account your new Balance and recalculate the new value of the 1/104th installment.