Got myself some energy monitoring Zigbee plugs and made an interesting discovery
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Yeah for real. Cheap and plentiful on eBay as well. That's where I get mine, and company surplus.
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If you get a reliable way to sleep a windows machine via MQTT (not sure if that's a route you'd take) but I'd be super interested in hearing about it.
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Is your gaming PC air gapped from the internet??
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No. What kind of attack are you afraid of by idling a computer connected to your ISP router?
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Any program on your PC that maintains or frequently initiates outbound connections, other machines on your Alan spreading an infection, literally any Trojan, etc.
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That'd be interesting, but I don't plan to integrate my PC that deeply into HA, if at all.
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If you are afraid of your PC infecting itself by background outbound connections, you should not turn it on at all. Running 24h vs 6h a day barely makes a difference in this regard - yes, there are fewer "random internet noise attacks" in less hours, but if your LAN is that dangerous, the computer should not be on for 5 minutes. Either you trust your LAN enough to have a computer running, or not.
Double that if you haven’t disabled UPnP on your ISP router which is probably on by default.
Talking about the sane defaults I mentioned earlier - my router has it off as a default. But if it wasn't, my approach wouldn't be to turn devices off¹ but change the router setting.
¹ I actually do turn off/plane mode all my non-server devices when I'm not using them but not for that reason.
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Do you have a link to the plugs? I want to try the same
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The CPU was done in BIOS on an ASUS x570. For me it was under AI Tweaker > Precision Boost Override > Curve Optimizer.
The GPU was done in the driver software on Windows. Or LACT if on Linux.
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I've got a decent handle on my electric bill. I already have it set to "equal pay", so I pay roughly the same amount every month - which includes my server cluster running 24/7.
I did some quick math, and my PC's estimated usage for a month is ~70 kW/h, which is ~$10 in my area. My last power bill was 1,145 kW/h total.
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70 kW is 16€ where I live and I have around 4000 kW per year.
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You’re totally right, not turning it on at all would be safer. But we do need to use them so it makes sense to turn it on while in use. Security is only good up to the point of it making your machine unusable. Most of the attacks you see on running computers by happens overnight anyway, or otherwise when your machine is sitting idle not in use. Plus it gives you the opportunity to witness odd behavior if it were to happen while you’re using it.
And no, you should never trust your LAN in the year of our lord 2025. We are well beyond that in the cybersecurity landscape and have been for 10+ years. Zero Trust is the name of the game. If a device is on, and connected to the internet, it’s a target, as are any other devices on that network.
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Those storage freezers are doing nothing the vast majority of the time. Not really a fair comparison.
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You must be pretty young, because back in the dark days of spinning HDDs a computer would take 5+ minutes to boot.
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TBH I didn't think it used a whole lot at idle, what with modern manufacturing processes and all. I was fairly surprised.
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Yeah, I noticed haha. Though I did have a big freezer some years ago that was a pretty hefty power suck... I never measured it, but it definitely affected my power bill.
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raise my 20-bay storage server.
I raise you my 72 bay monster... https://www.ebay.com/itm/126301431412
But I have 512 GB of ram in mine...
