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

Submitted ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩ by ⁨lka1988@sh.itjust.works⁩ to ⁨selfhosted@lemmy.world⁩

https://sh.itjust.works/pictrs/image/d752ecd4-edd9-45bb-9b02-ad288186c9f4.png

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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Comments

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slazer2au@lemmy.world ⁨4⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
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.

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- Darkassassin07@lemmy.ca ⁨4⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ 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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- lka1988@sh.itjust.works ⁨4⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
  One is a smaller chest freezer, about 3 feet tall, probably 10cuft if I had to guess. The other is a smaller Hamilton Beach upright freezer from Costco. Both are full, so that helps with keeping them cold.
  
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  - ryedaft@sh.itjust.works ⁨4⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
    Both are full so it reduces the amount of cold air that can escape when you open them.
    
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  - AnarchoSnowPlow@midwest.social ⁨4⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
    Is your upright the one with all the little compartments? That one looked to me like the most efficient upright design I’ve ever seen.
    
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- dmtalon@infosec.pub ⁨4⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
  And why the old “ice boxes” are top load only. And why most boat fridges/freezers are top-load, because energy is scares/finite when disconnected from power.
  
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  - corsicanguppy@lemmy.ca ⁨4⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
    Evaporative clay-pot coolers are also top-load for efficiency.
    
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  - lka1988@sh.itjust.works ⁨4⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
    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.
    
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FourPacketsOfPeanuts@lemmy.world ⁨4⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
Have you considered putting your gaming pc in one of the storage fridges? /s

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- lka1988@sh.itjust.works ⁨4⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
  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.
  
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  - IrateAnteater@sh.itjust.works ⁨4⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
    
    Measuring my server cluster
    
    Personally, I just don’t ask questions I don’t want the answer to.
    
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  - superweeniehutjrs@lemmy.world ⁨4⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
    Have you considered putting your children in one of the storage freezers? /s
    
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Xanza@lemm.ee ⁨4⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
Chest freezers are exceptionally energy efficient. It’s not a very good comparison.

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- lka1988@sh.itjust.works ⁨4⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
  Ah, but only one is a chest freezer 😉
  
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unexposedhazard@discuss.tchncs.de ⁨4⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
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

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- pulsewidth@lemmy.world ⁨4⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
  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.
  
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  - unexposedhazard@discuss.tchncs.de ⁨4⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
    
    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.
    
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  - droporain@lemmynsfw.com ⁨4⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
    Did you check the bios?
    
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- vividspecter@lemm.ee ⁨4⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
  
  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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- lka1988@sh.itjust.works ⁨4⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
  TBH I didn’t think it used a whole lot at idle, what with modern manufacturing processes and all. I was fairly surprised.
  
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PieMePlenty@lemmy.world ⁨4⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
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:

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- czardestructo@lemmy.world ⁨4⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ 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.
  
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- rbesfe@lemmy.ca ⁨4⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
  What are you running your server on?
  
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  - PieMePlenty@lemmy.world ⁨4⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
    11th gen i5 NUC.
    
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- Cocodapuf@lemmy.world ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
  
  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.
  
  My state has a green energy initiative that gives us free home energy audits, mostly it means we get a lot of free led lights. But it also got us these nice automated power strips, you plug one item (the pc) into a control socket, and when that device turns off, it cuts power to the other managed sockets (monitors, speakers, etc). A really simple solution that must save a bunch of power.
  
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  - CompactFlax@discuss.tchncs.de ⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago
    What brand are those power strips? Last time I went shopping for power strips, they were all the rage and I could hardly find one WITHOUT that feature. Today, several years later, I can’t find any. Except, perhaps, some Chinese ones without safety approvals. I need one for my tv.
    
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rimjob_rainer@discuss.tchncs.de ⁨4⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ 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…

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

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- possiblylinux127@lemmy.zip ⁨4⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
  There is a reason people opt for old desktop CPUs and SSD’s
  
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  - lka1988@sh.itjust.works ⁨4⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
    Part of why I’m going with the ‘T’ variant of the Pentium G4560 on my custom NAS build.
    
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- Zeoic@lemmy.world ⁨4⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ 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.
  
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  - OhVenus_Baby@lemmy.ml ⁨4⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
    Easy to miss typing in a hurry too. I just did it above.
    
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  - rimjob_rainer@discuss.tchncs.de ⁨4⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ 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 consumes 400Wh per day or around 16Wh. That’s also the reason why I was shocked about the consumption, as you would guess a freezer takes more.
    
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- lka1988@sh.itjust.works ⁨4⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ 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.
  
  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.
  
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  - rimjob_rainer@discuss.tchncs.de ⁨4⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
    70 kW is 16€ where I live and I have around 4000 kW per year.
    
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fmstrat@lemmy.nowsci.com ⁨4⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
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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- lka1988@sh.itjust.works ⁨4⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
  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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  - fmstrat@lemmy.nowsci.com ⁨4⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
    Oh nice. Do you have a link to the plugs you chose? I got some 20amp ZigBees from Aliexpress for $3 each, work great, but I wouldn’t trust them to handle their rating.
    
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- umbrella@lemmy.ml ⁨4⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
  how do you deal with kb+trackpad not working after wake?
  
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  - fmstrat@lemmy.nowsci.com ⁨4⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
    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?
    
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- Pretzilla@lemmy.world ⁨4⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
  Questionable approach since a cheap ‘surge protector’ could very well start a fire
  
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kylian0087@lemmy.dbzer0.com ⁨4⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
If it gets the wife approval you know you are on to something

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JASN_DE@lemmy.world ⁨4⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

monitors

Don’t underestimate the power draw of multiple monitors.

But while you’re at it: simply turn off different devices on the same power strip and check what actually draws how much.

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- lka1988@sh.itjust.works ⁨4⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
  The PC itself was drawing 90 watts. The current draw right now - dual 1080p monitors, HA server, a 5-port switch, and a couple other small things - is about 12 watts.
  
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Darkassassin07@lemmy.ca ⁨4⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
If you want to expand from just monitoring a couple sockets to monitoring the whole house; I’d recommend Iotawatt. I’ve been using one of these to monitor every circuit in my house for a few years now.

You can use the built in webpages shown below to view it’s internal graphs, or setup an exporter to feed the data into external DBs like influxDB+Graphana or Emoncms.

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- lka1988@sh.itjust.works ⁨4⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
  Very cool! However, my house is a rental, so any monitoring equipment has to be somewhat non-invasive.
  
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  - Darkassassin07@lemmy.ca ⁨4⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
    I’m in a rental too. It’s non-invasive; just gotta pop the panel cover off, clip the transformers over the wires without disconnecting them, and put the cover back.
    
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sugar_in_your_tea@sh.itjust.works ⁨4⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
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 - 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.
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- lka1988@sh.itjust.works ⁨4⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
  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.
  
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  - sugar_in_your_tea@sh.itjust.works ⁨4⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
    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.
    
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flubba86@lemmy.world ⁨4⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
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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- Psythik@lemmy.world ⁨4⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
  That’s nothing; my Ryzen 7000 machine uses 150w at idle. Modern high-end desktops draw a lot of power.
  
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- lka1988@sh.itjust.works ⁨4⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
  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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  - flubba86@lemmy.world ⁨4⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
    
    (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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m0darn@lemmy.ca ⁨4⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
What unhealthy eating habit are you indulging in at 21:45?

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- lka1988@sh.itjust.works ⁨4⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
  Current spike from both freezers starting up
  
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cygnus@lemmy.ca ⁨4⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
How is it possible that it draws 100W at idle? What is it even doing?

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- lka1988@sh.itjust.works ⁨4⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
  The PC was drawing ~90W. All solid state, no spinning rust. Lots of fans though, since it’s air-cooled. Not entirely sure what was causing the draw, but it’s definitely something I want to investigate at some point.
  
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  - LiveLM@lemmy.zip ⁨4⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
    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
    
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- dogma11@lemmy.world ⁨4⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
  Hard drives, especially spinning discs, and RAM are probably the biggest factor at idle. I dropped my servers’ idle draw from 220w to 180w by dropping it’s RAM and replacing some older drives.
  
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  - paraphrand@lemmy.world ⁨4⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
    People underestimate how more RAM can be more power usage.
    
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SweetMylk@lemm.ee ⁨4⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
Does it clock down when idle?

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- lka1988@sh.itjust.works ⁨4⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
  No idea. I would imagine it does, but that’s something I’ll need to check.
  
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  - amorpheus@lemmy.world ⁨4⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
    You can also test if multiple monitors is having an effect.
    
    Using sleep mode is a good idea anyways, regardless of idle draw.
    
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AliSaket@mander.xyz ⁨4⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
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 :)

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- lka1988@sh.itjust.works ⁨4⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
  That’s certainly one way to do it…
  
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vividspecter@lemm.ee ⁨4⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
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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- lka1988@sh.itjust.works ⁨4⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
  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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  - Schmuppes@lemmy.today ⁨4⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
    36 Watts idle sounds like a lot for a 5800X3D. I’ll see what my 5700X3D does, never checked that. Not in software and not at the wall.
    
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- Psythik@lemmy.world ⁨4⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
  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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Strit@lemmy.linuxuserspace.show ⁨4⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
I also found out something interesting. My desktop uses about 1/3 of the power one of my freezers do. :)

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- lka1988@sh.itjust.works ⁨4⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
  That’s either a super efficient PC or a really old freezer 😂
  
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  - Strit@lemmy.linuxuserspace.show ⁨4⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
    The PC is effecient. It’s not a gaming PC. It idles at around 16W and maxes out at 80’ish.
    
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ryannathans@aussie.zone ⁨4⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
Do you have a link to the plugs? I want to try the same

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- lka1988@sh.itjust.works ⁨4⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
  Sure!
  
  www.amazon.com/dp/B0DQTFM1T6
  
  Just plug it in, hold the button to put it into pairing mode, then launch your zigbee discovery method. No app, no wifi, no bluetooth. Just pure local control.
  
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  - ryannathans@aussie.zone ⁨4⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
    Ah shit, I need 240v lol
    
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Windex007@lemmy.world ⁨4⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
I had a similar revelation. Home assistant has a WOL component, so you can set that up for easy starts. I’ve had mixed success with mechanisms to get HA to sleep the computer, though.

Ideally I want the machine to be sleeping I’d I’m not using it.

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Codilingus@sh.itjust.works ⁨4⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
It will help some, and will also help temps, but AMD hardware does well with undervolting, especially the 5800X3D. I undervolt mine, and read the consensus that - 30 across all cores should be achievable for anyone, unless they’re really, really unlucky. My 6800 XT I also only run @ 92% Voltage, and it runs cooler and faster now, too.

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source_of_truth@lemmy.world ⁨4⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
100W while idling seems like way too much?

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sploosh@lemmy.world ⁨4⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ 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.

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Showroom7561@lemmy.ca ⁨4⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

I bought two “Eightree” brand Zigbee-compatible plugs to see how they fare.

Did you need a Zigbee hub to get them working? I was gifted an Eighttree Zigbee plug with energy monitoring, but it seems to require using a hardware hub :(

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Majorllama@lemmy.world ⁨4⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
I got a UPS cause the breaker to my room likes to trip if I am gaming and someone in the house decides to microwave something for 10 minutes. My desktop, three monitors (2x1080p 60hz + a 1440p 144hz) and my 3d printer all running at full tilt will suck my 1500w UPS dry in about 2 minutes lol.

If I’m not gaming and say just watching YouTube while not 3d printing anything that same UPS can run for almost 15 minutes.

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Cocodapuf@lemmy.world ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
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.

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possiblylinux127@lemmy.zip ⁨4⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
I love my old desktops that pull almost nothing.

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Cooljimy84@lemmy.world ⁨4⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
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 !

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