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

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36 Watts idle sounds like a lot for a 5800X3D. I'll see what my 5700X3D does, never checked that. Not in software and not at the wall.

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Just fyi, Watts is a measure of power, and WattHours is power over time. So your home network and server consume 130w, which would be 130wh after an hour, or 3120wh after a day. The chest freezer would be 400wh in a day, rather than 400w in a day.

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Most rented bedrooms in my area dont even have built-in lighting. Its all floor and table lamps, usually on a smart outlet these days

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Thanks for the heads up, I often let the time slip when casually talking about stuff like this.

Actually the server and network consumes 130Wh or around 3120Wh a day, while my freezer consumes 400Wh per day or around 16Wh. That's also the reason why I was shocked about the consumption, as you would guess a freezer takes more.

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What are you running your server on?

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Fail safe. It'll trip the power before it hits the wall and burns the house potentially limiting a fire or containing whatever did happen.

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You're in the same boat as me, except swap 70's for 1920's. I have to tear down all the plaster -- not drywall, actual literal plaster, on lath -- to get at the ground floor wiring. I decided it's fine where it is for now.

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Major issue lol short circuit or too thin of wire/breaker, old house probably. Instant dim and back to normal turning on a heavy appliance can happen as the power circuit lags but it's a mere fraction of a second.

So to turn on an appliance I'm pretty sure it takes 3000 watts to cycle on then reduces to say 1500 watts to operate a normal 1500w appliance. Nothing should ever continuously dim lights. Major fire hazard if so.

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Windows is gonna Windows. Even if you did track down the issue your one update from a borked system or square one when they alter the setting and relocate it on their own accord.

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Easy to miss typing in a hurry too. I just did it above.

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Yeah I made a similar discovery after installing a Shelly Switch with Power Metering. The monitors and their brightness make a huge difference as well when in or near idle (for photography, so not a surprise). I've also implemented an "anti-standby" function, so the switch opens whenever the current falls under a specific threshold.

For the WoL, since I have a switch, I configured my BIOS so it would turn on after power loss. Now I can start to boot up from afar

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Older speakers like that use always on transformers, constantly wasting energy to keep the core energized. You're correct those cannot be made any more, they must use efficient switch mode supplies.

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Yeah at some point you just say fuck it and limp along until the problem is big enough that it's time for a completely new house or you move.

In our situation it's one of those things where it just doesn't seem worth it to properly address because if we are gonna have an electrician cut a bunch of holes in our walls to redo all the wiring we may as well have a plumber cut a bunch of holes in our ceiling to insulate all the pipes they installed in the ceiling crawl space without any insulation. And if we have them cutting holes in every wall and every ceiling we may as we lost have them tear the whole goddamn house down and start over properly lol.

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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.

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

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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