I’m in the process of getting my Home Assistant environment up and running, and decided to run a test: it turns out that my gaming PC (custom 5800X3D/7900XTX build) uses more power just sitting idle, than both of my storage freezers combined.

Background: In addition to some other things, I bought two “Eightree” brand Zigbee-compatible plugs to see how they fare. One is monitoring the power usage of both freezers on a power strip (don’t worry, it’s a heavy duty strip meant for this), and the other is measuring the usage of my entire desktop setup (including monitors and the HA server itself, a Lenovo M710q).

After monitoring these for a couple days, I decided that I will shut off my PC unless I’m actively using it. It’s not a server, but it does have WOL capability, so if I absolutely need to get into it remotely, it won’t be an issue.

Pretty fascinating stuff, and now my wife is completely on board as well; she wants to put a plug on her iMac to see what it draws, as she uses it to hold her cross-stitch files and other things.

  • sugar_in_your_tea@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
    3·
    3 hours ago

    Cool!

    Just be cautious that you don’t over-optimize for power. I ran around my house w/ a Kill-a-watt meter checking everything and made some tweaks, and I still don’t think it has paid for itself since power costs are so low here ($0.12-0.13/kWh, so 10Wh 24/7 < $1/month), and some of the things I tried doing made my life kinda suck. So I backed off a bit and found a good middleground where I got 80% of the benefit w/o any real compromises.

    For example, here’s what I ended up with:

    • put desktop to sleep - power draw is negligible, and I don’t need to keep typing my FDE password to use it
    • “upgraded” NAS from old 2009 HW to my old gaming PC HW (1st gen Ryzen) - cut power draw in half, but I had to buy some RAM; will take years to pay off w/ electricity savings, but it has much better performance in the meantime
    • turn off work laptop - was drawing ~20W; I WFH MThF, so I leave it on Th night for convenience, but have it sleep M-W and turn it off Friday

    I could probably cut a bit more if I really try, but that would be annoying.

    • lka1988@sh.itjust.worksOPEnglish
      1·
      3 hours ago

      Yeah, my power bill is pretty reasonable already, considering my large family plus all the electronics I run. I just like seeing what everything is doing as a matter of curiosity.

      • sugar_in_your_tea@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
        1·
        1 hour ago

        Oh yeah, as a hobby, it’s absolutely fun. I like tinkering with all kinds of things.

        My point was to just be careful since it’s not necessarily going to be worth the expense and time.

        I’ve been considering getting a breaker-level power monitor to watch for spikes. It’s a bit more expensive (hundreds of dollars), but it measures the types of things I’m interested in. My kid flipped on our gutter heaters (I never use them) and shot our electricity bill to the moon for a couple months until I noticed. If I had a home energy monitor, I would’ve noticed a crazy energy spike and that might have paid for itself.

        • lka1988@sh.itjust.worksOPEnglish
          1·
          47 minutes ago

          Yeah, I never expect a financial ROI for hobbies; the ROI for that is nothing more than my own enjoyment.