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

[lka1988@sh.itjust.works]

It's attached via USB to a 2014-era Mac Mini. Honestly not a huge fan of it.

The kicker is that I'm upgrading it to a 7th-gen based server soon. My dad gave me an old Pentium 4-powered HP Proliant DL110, the case of which has 10x 3.5" drive bays, and is fully ATX compatible, so I'm gonna drop in a 7th gen mobo with Pentium G4560T (already have that on my desk), a newer PSU, and an HBA card. Don't need a ton of processing power for a dedicated NAS running OMV - just a lot of expansion capacity.

[lka1988@sh.itjust.works]

The monitors are part of a 12W draw left after shutting off the PC. The plug is measuring everything plugged into the power strip that powers all of my desktop equipment. The PC itself was drawing ~90W at idle.

[livelm@lemmy.zip]

Check your GPU power usage, I remember seeing people complaining about theirs not clocking down if they had a second monitor plugged in, and other similar issues

[darkassassin07@lemmy.ca]

That's between you and your landlord. Mine was fine with it as it doesn't actually modify any of the wiring.

[lka1988@sh.itjust.works]

Any time I clear out the chest freezer to defrost or get to something at the bottom, the lower half stays below freezing for quite a while. Love that little freezer.

[mudman@fedia.io]

Yeah, I guess that's how mini PCs got popular in the first place. Just cram a laptop in a box, get most of the performance and less of the hassle. At a premium, of course, so I imagine on the manufacturing side it's quite the win/win.

Still, a 10x multiplier in power consumption at idle and over 5x under load is pretty wild.

[paraphrand@lemmy.world]

People underestimate how more RAM can be more power usage.

[cooljimy84@lemmy.world]

So my partner and I use laptops (small flat) so really sip power compared to the 65 watt of the monitor

[lka1988@sh.itjust.works]

Worth a look. One monitor uses HDMI, the other uses DisplayPort. They're just cheap secondhand 1080p monitors to get me by until I toss them for an ultrawide 1440p unit.

[lka1988@sh.itjust.works]

Very nice. I don't like laptops for gaming, but I recognize and appreciate the utility of them; I use my laptop (Thinkpad T14 G1 AMD) more than my gaming PC for most things outside of that.

[lka1988@sh.itjust.works]

Yeah for real. Cheap and plentiful on eBay as well. That's where I get mine, and company surplus.

[windex007@lemmy.world]

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.

[encryptkeeper@lemmy.world]

Is your gaming PC air gapped from the internet??

[tofuwabohu@slrpnk.net]

No. What kind of attack are you afraid of by idling a computer connected to your ISP router?

[encryptkeeper@lemmy.world]

Any program on your PC that maintains or frequently initiates outbound connections, other machines on your Alan spreading an infection, literally any Trojan, etc.

[lka1988@sh.itjust.works]

That'd be interesting, but I don't plan to integrate my PC that deeply into HA, if at all.

[tofuwabohu@slrpnk.net]

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.

[rimjob_rainer@discuss.tchncs.de]

Yeah, energy monitoring ruined several things for me. Can't let my PC idle anymore, can only turn on the dishwasher when the sun is shining, need to explain regularly to my wife, why our home network and server infrastructure consume 130 Watts per hour...

The damn freezer consumes only 400 Watts per day while Network infrastructure, server, Wallpanels and KNX consume 3 Kilowatts.

[ryannathans@aussie.zone]

Do you have a link to the plugs? I want to try the same

[codilingus@sh.itjust.works]

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.