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Got myself some energy monitoring Zigbee plugs and made an interesting discovery (sh.itjust.works)
submitted 2 days ago* (last edited 2 days ago) by lka1988@sh.itjust.works to c/selfhosted@lemmy.world
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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.

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[–] source_of_truth@lemmy.world 1 points 3 hours ago* (last edited 3 hours ago)

100W while idling seems like way too much?

Edit: maybe not, they list 75W for whole system idle here with 5800X3D.

[–] kylian0087@lemmy.dbzer0.com 6 points 18 hours ago

If it gets the wife approval you know you are on to something

[–] m0darn@lemmy.ca 1 points 13 hours ago (1 children)

What unhealthy eating habit are you indulging in at 21:45?

[–] lka1988@sh.itjust.works 1 points 13 hours ago

Current spike from both freezers starting up

[–] sploosh@lemmy.world 1 points 14 hours ago

I recently bought a Mac Mini because music production on Linux had me fighting my tools more than using them. My Linux box is a 7800x3d/7800xtx. The Mini idles at 4w, while the 78000xtx alone idles closer to 50w. I use the mini for everything non-gaming now.

[–] Xanza@lemm.ee 25 points 1 day ago (1 children)

Chest freezers are exceptionally energy efficient. It's not a very good comparison.

[–] lka1988@sh.itjust.works 5 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago)

Ah, but only one is a chest freezer 😉

That, and I used to have a freezer that was a power suck.

[–] PieMePlenty@lemmy.world 14 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago) (2 children)

I discovered a similar issue. PC desk was using 8-9W when the PC was turned OFF! My power strip was taking a bit under 1W (the little light, old), two smart bulbs as well but I'll allow those losses. An older Logitech speaker setup (2+1) was taking 6-7W, turned off! Crazy.. and illegal if it were made today (in EU). So this is completely wasted energy in my opinion.. started disconnecting the whole desk now.

For comparison, my home server is averaging 7-8W, turned on all the time:

I also learned that PC's draw a lot of power lol. I used to sit on my PC all day, now I know how much it cost. Even the monitor turning off splits the power draw by half.

[–] czardestructo@lemmy.world 6 points 1 day ago

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.

[–] rbesfe@lemmy.ca 2 points 1 day ago (1 children)

What are you running your server on?

[–] PieMePlenty@lemmy.world 2 points 23 hours ago* (last edited 23 hours ago)

11th gen i3 NUC.

[–] sugar_in_your_tea@sh.itjust.works 6 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago) (1 children)

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 (1st gen Ryzen) - 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.

[–] lka1988@sh.itjust.works 2 points 1 day ago (1 children)

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.

[–] sugar_in_your_tea@sh.itjust.works 3 points 1 day ago (1 children)

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.

[–] lka1988@sh.itjust.works 2 points 1 day ago

Yeah, I never expect a financial ROI for hobbies; the ROI for that is nothing more than my own enjoyment.

[–] slazer2au@lemmy.world 58 points 2 days ago (9 children)

What kind of freezers are they? I hear that top loading freezers are quite efficient because the cool doesn't escape when it gets opened like a front loading one.

[–] Darkassassin07@lemmy.ca 31 points 2 days ago

That's true; once everything inside is brought down to temp, they use very little power to stay cold.

My regular fridge uses ~500-800wh a day (depending on how much it got opened). My chest freezer though, uses ~200wh/day pretty consistently.

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[–] AliSaket@mander.xyz 4 points 1 day ago (1 children)

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 :)

[–] lka1988@sh.itjust.works 2 points 1 day ago

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

[–] fmstrat@lemmy.nowsci.com 12 points 2 days ago (4 children)

Couple of thoughts:

  1. 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.

  2. 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.

[–] Pretzilla@lemmy.world 0 points 17 hours ago

Questionable approach since a cheap 'surge protector' could very well start a fire

[–] Sinthesis@lemmy.today 7 points 1 day ago (3 children)

Place a surge protector between the smart plug and the PC to be safe.

What benefit does this serve in this situation?

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[–] lka1988@sh.itjust.works 12 points 2 days ago (3 children)

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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[–] umbrella@lemmy.ml 5 points 1 day ago (1 children)

how do you deal with kb+trackpad not working after wake?

[–] fmstrat@lemmy.nowsci.com 1 points 1 day ago (1 children)

Depends on the driver. Usually for finicky ones you can do an rmmod at suspend and a modprobe on resume. What distro, and are you using the default suspend mechanism?

[–] umbrella@lemmy.ml 1 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago) (1 children)

yes, i'm on ubuntu, using all the default drivers.

and i would guess its finnicky because its an old laptop.

is it a matter of scripting rmmod and modprobe to run on suspend/wake?

[–] fmstrat@lemmy.nowsci.com 1 points 1 day ago (1 children)

There are a couple of ways:

  1. Formally add a system entry to run at suspend/resume (like how nvidia does in their driver package)

Or

  1. Write a script that rmmods, suspends, sleeps, modprobes, and map it to Cntrl-Alt-Shift-S

I usually do 2 because I like the hotkey method for desktops, and it keeps things the same for both. Also allows me to close a lid on a laptop and leave it on. But 1 is more "formal".

Happy to share some scripts if you'd like, on my phone now, though.

[–] umbrella@lemmy.ml 1 points 23 hours ago (1 children)

how do i do 1? having timeout to suspend and lid close to suspend would be great. and id like to see some example scripts!

i had pretty much given up on standby with this one.

[–] fmstrat@lemmy.nowsci.com 2 points 11 hours ago (1 children)

Will grab some when I back, but assuming you are using systemd, it's easy if you follow this old but good method: https://blog.christophersmart.com/2016/05/11/running-scripts-before-and-after-suspend-with-systemd/

If that doesn't work out of the box, it's likely because you're hitting S1 instead of S3, but give that test script a shot and let me know how it goes!

[–] umbrella@lemmy.ml 2 points 10 hours ago

i will test that out later today, thanks!

[–] FourPacketsOfPeanuts@lemmy.world 36 points 2 days ago* (last edited 2 days ago) (3 children)

Have you considered putting your gaming pc in one of the storage freezers? /s

[–] lka1988@sh.itjust.works 25 points 2 days ago* (last edited 2 days ago) (3 children)

Perfect, I don't need to run the fans anymore!

Seriously though - we have 5 kids, and feeding the little shits is expensive, so we freeze a lot of things for storage. I thought for certain the freezers would be power hogs compared to an idling PC, but I was very surprised to be proven wrong.

Next up... Measuring my server cluster 😬

[–] IrateAnteater@sh.itjust.works 36 points 2 days ago (8 children)

Measuring my server cluster

Personally, I just don't ask questions I don't want the answer to.

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[–] MudMan@fedia.io 30 points 2 days ago (14 children)

Yeah, man, getting into Home Assistant and messing with energy monitoring did more than thousands of chastising TV segments to get me to fully shut down my computers.

Who gives a crap about gaming use power consumption, give me idle benchmarks, you cowards. Do you even know how kWh work?

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[–] unexposedhazard@discuss.tchncs.de 17 points 2 days ago (4 children)

It has never occured to me my whole life to not suspend or shut down computers overnight. It wakes up in like 2 seconds why wouldnt you, even if it used only an extra 1W

[–] pulsewidth@lemmy.world 9 points 1 day ago (2 children)

The problem I have with this I put the PC to sleep overnight every night - and like clockwork, Windows wakes it back up sometime overnight to do.. Something.

I've been diagnosing the issue for years - checking wake timers, switching hardware devices permissions to wake the system off. I might fix it for a few months and then a new Windows update comes along and it's back to its usual routine of waking itself.

Looking forward to seeing if it persists with Linux when I move at the end of support period for Win10 later this year.

[–] droporain@lemmynsfw.com 1 points 1 day ago

Did you check the bios?

[–] unexposedhazard@discuss.tchncs.de 11 points 1 day ago (2 children)

Looking forward to seeing if it persists with Linux

I have never had what you described happen in my past 15 years of using linux, i hope you find your way around things, linux is dope once you get used to it.

My PC goes down from 70W idle to 2W when suspended. I also have a master slave power strip, that turns of all my peripherals (speakers, lights, audio interface, etc) when the PC drops below 10W so that saves some extra energy.

[–] pulsewidth@lemmy.world 1 points 1 day ago

Yeah I use Linux for my servers and my HTPC, but I never really hibernate or sleep those so I had no idea if it might occur there too. It's great to hear this is not likely to be an issue - thanks

[–] OhVenus_Baby@lemmy.ml 3 points 1 day ago

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.

[–] SaltySalamander@fedia.io 17 points 2 days ago (4 children)

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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[–] SaltySalamander@fedia.io 16 points 2 days ago (1 children)

Those storage freezers are doing nothing the vast majority of the time. Not really a fair comparison.

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[–] rimjob_rainer@discuss.tchncs.de 12 points 2 days ago* (last edited 2 days ago) (6 children)

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.world 4 points 1 day ago (2 children)

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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