I’m in the process of getting my Home Assistant environment up and running, and decided to run a test: it turns out that my gaming PC (custom 5800X3D/7900XTX build) uses more power just sitting idle, than both of my storage freezers combined.

Background: In addition to some other things, I bought two “Eightree” brand Zigbee-compatible plugs to see how they fare. One is monitoring the power usage of both freezers on a power strip (don’t worry, it’s a heavy duty strip meant for this), and the other is measuring the usage of my entire desktop setup (including monitors and the HA server itself, a Lenovo M710q).

After monitoring these for a couple days, I decided that I will shut off my PC unless I’m actively using it. It’s not a server, but it does have WOL capability, so if I absolutely need to get into it remotely, it won’t be an issue.

Pretty fascinating stuff, and now my wife is completely on board as well; she wants to put a plug on her iMac to see what it draws, as she uses it to hold her cross-stitch files and other things.

  • rimjob_rainer@discuss.tchncs.deEnglish
    131·
    18 hours ago

    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, have to automate all plugs with standby devices connected…

    The damn freezer consumes only 400 Watts per day while Network infrastructure, server, Wallpanels and KNX consume 3 Kilowatts, I wish I would have never learned this.

    • Zeoic@lemmy.worldEnglish
      1·
      1 hour ago

      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.

      • rimjob_rainer@discuss.tchncs.deEnglish
        11·
        1 hour ago

        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 (actually a fridge) consumes 400Wh per day or around 16Wh. That’s also the reason why I was shocked about the consumption, as you would guess a fridge takes more.

      • lka1988@sh.itjust.worksOPEnglish
        2·
        25 minutes ago

        Part of why I’m going with the ‘T’ SKU Pentium G4560T instead of the standard G4560 on my custom NAS build.

    • lka1988@sh.itjust.worksOPEnglish
      2·
      17 hours ago

      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.