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

[lka1988@sh.itjust.works]

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.

[fourpacketsofpeanuts@lemmy.world]

Have you considered putting your gaming pc in one of the storage freezers? /s

[lka1988@sh.itjust.works]

Perfect, I don't need to run the fans anymore!

Seriously though - we have 5 kids, and feeding the little shits is expensive, so we freeze a lot of things for storage. I thought for certain they would be power hogs, but I was very surprised to be proven wrong.

[jasn_de@lemmy.world]

monitors

Don't underestimate the power draw of multiple monitors.

But while you're at it: simply turn off different devices on the same power strip and check what actually draws how much.

[cooljimy84@lemmy.world]

What res is that monitor ? My 2k monitor is pretty hungry compared to my old 1080. Even just looking at the uk energy efficiency ratings for 4k tells shocks me !

[lka1988@sh.itjust.works]

Right now I just run dual 1080p. I want an ultrawide 120Hz at some point, but priorities... My entire desk setup is currently consuming 12 watts with the PC shut off.

[lka1988@sh.itjust.works]

The PC itself was drawing 90 watts. The current draw right now - dual 1080p monitors, HA server, a 5-port switch, and a couple other small things - is about 12 watts. Desk power measurement is the yellow line, freezers are the blue line.

[slazer2au@lemmy.world]

What kind of freezers are they? I hear that top loading freezers are quite efficient because the cool doesn't escape when it gets opened like a front loading one.

[superweeniehutjrs@lemmy.world]

Have you considered putting your children in one of the storage freezers? /s

[majorllama@lemmy.world]

I got a UPS cause the breaker to my room likes to trip if I am gaming and someone in the house decides to microwave something for 10 minutes. My desktop, three monitors (2x1080p 60hz + a 1440p 144hz) and my 3d printer all running at full tilt will suck my 1500w UPS dry in about 2 minutes lol.

If I'm not gaming and say just watching YouTube while not 3d printing anything that same UPS can run for almost 15 minutes.

[irateanteater@sh.itjust.works]

Measuring my server cluster

Personally, I just don't ask questions I don't want the answer to.

[mudman@fedia.io]

Yeah, man, getting into Home Assistant and messing with energy monitoring did more than thousands of chastising TV segments to get me to fully shut down my computers.

Who gives a crap about gaming use power consumption, give me idle benchmarks, you cowards. Do you even know how kWh work?

[darkassassin07@lemmy.ca]

That's true; once everything inside is brought down to temp, they use very little power to stay cold.

My regular fridge uses ~500-800wh a day (depending on how much it got opened). My chest freezer though, uses ~200wh/day pretty consistently.

[lka1988@sh.itjust.works]

I know they're gonna be a power suck lol. Three mini PCs, a SFF PC, 4-bay hard drive docking station, 8-port switch, and a RPi0w... Hoping for a max of 200W, but I suppose we'll see what happens 🫤

[darkassassin07@lemmy.ca]

breaker to my room likes to trip if I am gaming and someone in the house decides to microwave something

... Why the hell is your pc on the same breaker as the kitchen??

The kitchen plugs should have their own dedicated breaker in most modern electrical codes (at least in North America). The voltage drop your pc experiences everytime a high-load item like a microwave or kettle is turned on, on the same circuit, is really rough on your PSU.

At least you have a UPS which presumably performs some power conditioning, but still. Not great.

[mudman@fedia.io]

A fun one to put in perspective how hideously power hungry modern desktop PCs are is that I have an old (ish) laptop running as a local Plex server that also has a LLM loaded in there and a few other docker bits and pieces and it just sits happily humming at 10W idle (which is as much as my TV draws when it's turned off).

I've looked into building a small form factor PC to replace it at some point but all the spare parts I have lying around would draw as much idle as when that tiny thing is going full tilt and I just can't justify it for something that just stays on waiting for me to feel like rewatching The Matrix or whatever.

[sunzu2@thebrainbin.org]

Plus PC that's idling is just adding an attack surface IMHO

This tinfoil getting hella tight lately 🥲

[lka1988@sh.itjust.works]

One is a smaller chest freezer, about 3 feet tall, probably 10cuft if I had to guess. The other is a smaller Hamilton Beach upright freezer from Costco. Both are full, so that helps with keeping them cold.

[sunzu2@thebrainbin.org]

This gave me a serious chuckle... BC I deff considered it. Or keeping the box on balcony in the winter to get few more fps back in the day

[darkassassin07@lemmy.ca]

If you want to expand from just monitoring a couple sockets to monitoring the whole house; I'd recommend Iotawatt. I've been using one of these to monitor every circuit in my house for a few years now.

You can use the built in webpages shown below to view it's internal graphs, or setup an exporter to feed the data into external DBs like influxDB+Graphana or Emoncms.