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

[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.

[dual_sport_dork@lemmy.world]

You used the magic word, "modern."

Lots of houses in this world are not modern, and some of them are old enough that they were retrofitted to have electricity, as mine was, rather than even being built with it to begin with. And done so in a haphazard manner when electrical codes were either much more lax than now or didn't exist. And further when the expected power draw for a household was considerably lower, because basically all of it in the 1920's or whatever was only used for lighting and we didn't have all of our current appliances, TV's, computers, 3D printers, or even indoor space heaters.

So moaning about what ought to be rather than what is really doesn't accomplish anything, especially in OP's case.

My small house has basically the entire ground floor wired to only two 15 amp circuits.

[sweetmylk@lemm.ee]

Does it clock down when idle?

[catloaf@lemm.ee]

You might need to lower your expectations

[cygnus@lemmy.ca]

How is it possible that it draws 100W at idle? What is it even doing?

[showroom7561@lemmy.ca]

I bought two “Eightree” brand Zigbee-compatible plugs to see how they fare.

Did you need a Zigbee hub to get them working? I was gifted an Eighttree Zigbee plug with energy monitoring, but it seems to require using a hardware hub

[darkassassin07@lemmy.ca]

A lot of people aren't even aware of the concern. That's why I bring it up.

Paying an electrician to add a breaker is much cheaper than replacing the PC. Tho that's up to OC if they want to pursue that. I'm just putting the info out there for them to consider.

[dmtalon@infosec.pub]

And why the old "ice boxes" are top load only. And why most boat fridges/freezers are top-load, because energy is scares/finite when disconnected from power.

[codilingus@sh.itjust.works]

It will help some, and will also help temps, but AMD hardware does well with undervolting, especially the 5800X3D. I undervolt mine, and read the consensus that - 30 across all cores should be achievable for anyone, unless they're really, really unlucky. My 6800 XT I also only run @ 92% Voltage, and it runs cooler and faster now, too.