Got myself some energy monitoring Zigbee plugs and made an interesting discovery

[sugar_in_your_tea@sh.itjust.works]

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 - 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.works]

That's certainly one way to do it...

[lka1988@sh.itjust.works]

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.

[alphabethunter@lemmy.world]

Yeah, no amount of UPS is gonna fix a problem like that. It's more than time to rewire their whole electrical grid at home. That's quite literally a disaster waiting to happen.

[alphabethunter@lemmy.world]

Do everything outside the walls. I had the same problem in my house, I literally killed all the wires inside the walls and did a whole new installation in an industrial style outside the walls. It's way better for maintenance purposes anyway.

[majorllama@lemmy.world]

See I would have no problem with that but the other people living in this house would have a lot of problems with that. Namely the women. I know for a fact me and the other guys would prefer it but the ladies would never green light something that "ugly" lol.

[sugar_in_your_tea@sh.itjust.works]

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.

[fmstrat@lemmy.nowsci.com]

Oh nice. Do you have a link to the plugs you chose? I got some 20amp ZigBees from Aliexpress for $3 each, work great, but I wouldn't trust them to handle their rating.

[fmstrat@lemmy.nowsci.com]

Depends on the driver. Usually for finicky ones you can do an rmmod at suspend and a modprobe on resume. What distro, and are you using the default suspend mechanism?

[umbrella@lemmy.ml]

yes, i'm on ubuntu, using all the default drivers.

and i would guess its finnicky because its an old laptop.

[lka1988@sh.itjust.works]

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

[lka1988@sh.itjust.works]

https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0DQTFM1T6