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

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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...

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There is a reason people opt for old desktop CPUs and SSD's

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I love my old desktops that pull almost nothing.

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Those were different times.

They are not relevant anymore with current self hosting setups.

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Part of why I'm going with the 'T' variant of the Pentium G4560 on my custom NAS build.

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If I'm reading that correctly, that shows the system is drawing around 100W just sitting idle.

Something is not right there.

Either the power meter is way out of calibration, or there is a configuration issue with your PC. Maybe you have a performance setting that is causing the CPU and GPU to not idle down ever? Or a rogue antivirus software that is cranking the CPU constantly?

Are there any spinning disk hard drives in your PC? They can sometimes use around 5W each on idle. That was the biggest cause of idle power consumption on my old xeon server, with 8 HDDs.

PSU choice can also affect it. Eg, if you buy into marketing and buy a monster 850W PSU, but it's idle all the time and only uses 450W under load, then the PSU is spending the whole time outside it's efficiency curve, and can end up causing more power draw than expected.

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It's ~90W at idle; the plug is monitoring everything at my desk. No spinning rust, all solid state. Settings for CPU and GPU are all default at the moment. It does have an 850W PSU, but I've had it pulling over 700W at one point (dimming my bedroom lights), so that's somewhat justified

I'll dig into settings later, but for now I'm good just turning it off unless I'm using it.

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(dimming my bedroom lights)

Thats terrifying. Your desk outlet should not share a circuit with your bedroom lighting circuit, that makes no sense (unless you're talking about a desk lamp).

And regardless, if a 700W load can make your lights dim, then there's a major wiring issue in your house. Don't plug in an electric cooker, kettle, or space heater until you get that checked out.

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It has never occured to me my whole life to not suspend

Reliability issues with suspend-to-ram are rather common. Shutting down is an option, but session save and restore is a relatively recent thing and not supported by all desktop environments. I.e. it's the post startup part that takes the longest.

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My desktop PC idles quite high as well. The semi high-end consumer motherboards on the AMD side tend to use a lot of power at idle, so I think that's a big part of it (at least the x570 series, can't speak for later). And as others have said, high refresh rate and multiple monitors can make things worse.

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My X670E system also uses a shitload of power. Literally 150w at idle, no matter what I do. Tried disabling every unnecessary feature in the BIOS and enabling all the energy efficient settings I can find, to no avail. Drives me nuts.

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That's nothing; my Ryzen 7000 machine uses 150w at idle. Modern high-end desktops draw a lot of power.

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Couple of thoughts:

That smart plug may not be rated to the max wattage when GPU and CPU are at full blast. Be careful, because that could be an expensive mistake. Place a surge protector between the smart plug and the PC to be safe. Also run the PC full tilt for a while and make sure the smart plug doesnt get warm. If it does, fores have been known to start from those.
Sounds like you know this with WoL, but suspend is your friend If the gaming PC is linux and you run into suspend issues, let me know, I've seen 'em all.

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Maybe he meant the act of dimming his lights trough Home Assistant?

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The plugs are rated for 1800W each. Should be fine. I hit 670W a bit earlier, running Furmark VK and Cinebench R23 multi-core simultaneously for shits and giggles.

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I'm eyeballing HWINFO64, it's saying my GPU is idling at ~28W and the CPU is idling at ~36W. Add a couple watts for the fans, various peripherals, and waste heat; it's close to what I saw earlier.

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My entire master bedroom suite is on one 15A circuit. That's how most houses are. The lights are currently those damn CFL lights, so they aren't exactly difficult to dim - CFLs almost do it on their own when they're close to dying (which these ones are).

That, and it's a rental house.

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I use HASS.agent to help manage my Windows desktop and expose various sensors to HA. It can suspend or hibernate the system. It does use MQTT as its connectivity plane.

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Oh nice, I'll give that a shot. I was using IOTlink but the service wasn't reliable on my machine and needed to be restarted constantly...

I'll give HASS.agent a shot! Thanks

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