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Got myself some energy monitoring Zigbee plugs and made an interesting discovery (sh.itjust.works)

submitted 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago) by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

151 comments fedilink hide all child comments

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.

(page 3) 50 comments

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[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 month ago

I love my old desktops that pull almost nothing.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 3 weeks ago (1 children)

Yeah, I've actually been pretty disappointed as of late with the power consumption of my custom PCs. I actually can't remember the last time I had a PC with sleep states that actually work, maybe it was 8 years ago?

On my last motherboard, whenever you woke the machine from sleep, some board modules wouldn't power up correctly, you had to restart to get full functionality again. I have a second PC as a home media server, that one never fully wakes up from any sleep state (luckily it's a server, so it's always on). My current gaming PC regularly crashes whenever the machine is (ironically) at low processor load. (That's the amd automatic energy saving features totally failing)

I don't know whether to blame the motherboards, the processors, or the OS, but any way you slice it, my computers are only happy if they're consuming 300 watts all the time...

And on the other hand, I gather chest freezers are actually decently efficient.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 3 weeks ago* (last edited 3 weeks ago)

Chest freezers are very efficient. Ours is usually full, so it stays nice and cold unless you leave it unplugged for like a week straight.

I am curious to see what the PC's power usage looks like when I switch to Linux...

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 month ago (1 children)

What res is that monitor ? My 2k monitor is pretty hungry compared to my old 1080. Even just looking at the uk energy efficiency ratings for 4k tells shocks me !

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago) (2 children)

Right now I just run dual 1080p. I plan on upgrading to a 120Hz+ 1440p ultrawide at some point, but priorities... My entire desk setup is currently consuming 12 watts with the PC shut off. That's ~90W just from the PC.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 month ago (1 children)

Is your GPU reducing the VRAM frequency when it's idle?

If the vertical timing is different between the monitors, the VRAM will have to run at maximum speed all the time and that can add 20 watts or more to your idle power consumption.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 month ago

No idea, honestly, it's just the default settings. I haven't really had any time to tinker and optimize it to my liking for a while.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 1 month ago (1 children)

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

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