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.

  • slazer2au@lemmy.worldEnglish
    6·
    18 days 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.

    • Darkassassin07@lemmy.caEnglish
      5·
      18 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.

    • lka1988@sh.itjust.worksOPEnglish
      3·
      18 days ago

      One is a smaller chest freezer, about 3 feet tall, probably 6 or 7 cubic feet if I had to guess. The other is a Hamilton Beach upright freezer from Costco. Both are full, so that helps with keeping them cold.

        • corsicanguppy@lemmy.caEnglish
          1·
          17 days ago

          Without space between the contents, though, they freeze in phases and it affects how they come out. Watch out or just keep air gaps.

      • AnarchoSnowPlow@midwest.socialEnglish
        1·
        18 days 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.

        • lka1988@sh.itjust.worksOPEnglish
          3·
          13 days ago

          Yep, it’s awesome. We got it for $300 from Costco to supplement the smaller chest freezer, and it’s been an absolute godsend.

    • dmtalon@infosec.pubEnglish
      2·
      18 days 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.

      • lka1988@sh.itjust.worksOPEnglish
        1·
        18 days 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.

  • Xanza@lemm.eeEnglish
    5·
    17 days ago

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

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

      Ah, but only one is a chest freezer 😉

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

  • PieMePlenty@lemmy.worldEnglish
    5·
    17 days 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:

    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.worldEnglish
      3·
      17 days 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.

    • Cocodapuf@lemmy.worldEnglish
      1·
      9 days 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.

  • sugar_in_your_tea@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
    3·
    17 days 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 (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.worksOPEnglish
      1·
      17 days 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.

      • sugar_in_your_tea@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
        2·
        17 days 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.

        • lka1988@sh.itjust.worksOPEnglish
          1·
          17 days ago

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

  • sploosh@lemmy.worldEnglish
    2·
    16 days 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.

  • fmstrat@lemmy.nowsci.comEnglish
    2·
    17 days ago

    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.

  • MudMan@fedia.io
    2·
    18 days ago

    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?

    • lka1988@sh.itjust.worksOPEnglish
      1·
      18 days 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. 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 😬

        • lka1988@sh.itjust.worksOPEnglish
          0·
          18 days ago

          I know they’re gonna be a power suck lol. Three mini PCs, a SFF PC, 4-bay hard drive docking station, 8-port switch, and a RPi0w… Hoping for a max of 200W, but I suppose we’ll see what happens 🫤

            • lka1988@sh.itjust.worksOPEnglish
              2·
              13 days ago

              FYI - the cluster is pulling 115-140 watts.

              • 1x Mac mini 2014, running OMV as a dedicated NAS (i5-4308U, 16GB RAM)
              • 4-bay Sabrent DS-SC4B, attached to Mac mini (3x 4TB WD Reds in RAID5, 1x 4TB WD Black as hot spare)
              • 1x 8TB WD backup drive (it’s something)
              • 2x HP Elitedesk 800 G3 mini (or G4, don’t remember), both running Proxmox (i7-7700T, 32GB RAM each)
              • 1x Dell Optiplex 7050 SFF running Proxmox (i7-7700, 32GB RAM)

              All running multiple VMs (Docker and other) and LXC containers.

              I’m impressed, honestly. I was expecting 200+ watts minimum. It’ll be interesting to see the spikes as it’s used over time. I am going to move the HA server (Lenovo M710q running HAOS on a Pentium G4560T & 4GB RAM) down to the cluster soon, as it’s sitting on my desk at the moment…

              • catloaf@lemm.eeEnglish
                1·
                13 days ago

                I’m surprised! Seems like it should be more, but I haven’t done any wattage calculations in a while, so maybe power efficiency really has gotten that much better.

                Do you know if the drives were spun up or down at the time? I know idle vs. active makes a difference, but if they were spun down entirely, that’s kind of cheating.

                • lka1988@sh.itjust.worksOPEnglish
                  1·
                  13 days ago

                  I watched as everything booted, didn’t pull much more than 150 watts. But it’ll be interesting to see how it goes over time.

  • AliSaket@mander.xyzEnglish
    1·
    17 days 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 :)

  • Cocodapuf@lemmy.worldEnglish
    1·
    9 days 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.

    • lka1988@sh.itjust.worksOPEnglish
      1·
      9 days 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…

  • unexposedhazard@discuss.tchncs.deEnglish
    11·
    17 days 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

    • SaltySalamander@fedia.io
      2·
      17 days ago

      You must be pretty young, because back in the dark days of spinning HDDs a computer would take 5+ minutes to boot.

      • Appoxo@lemmy.dbzer0.comEnglish
        1·
        17 days ago

        Those days were at worst almost 10 years ago.
        Stop living in the past with those situations.

        And you get an SSD.
        And YOU get an SSD.
        And you fine sir also get an SSD!

      • Honytawk@lemmy.zipEnglish
        1·
        17 days ago

        Those were different times.

        They are not relevant anymore with current self hosting setups.

    • pulsewidth@lemmy.worldEnglish
      0·
      17 days 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.

      • unexposedhazard@discuss.tchncs.deEnglish
        3·
        17 days 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.

        • pulsewidth@lemmy.worldEnglish
          2·
          16 days 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.mlEnglish
          2·
          17 days 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.

  • Majorllama@lemmy.worldEnglish
    0·
    18 days 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.

    • Darkassassin07@lemmy.caEnglish
      0·
      18 days ago

      breaker to my room likes to trip if I am gaming and someone in the house decides to microwave something

      … Why the hell is your pc on the same breaker as the kitchen??

      The kitchen plugs should have their own dedicated breaker in most modern electrical codes (at least in North America). The voltage drop your pc experiences everytime a high-load item like a microwave or kettle is turned on, on the same circuit, is really rough on your PSU.

      At least you have a UPS which presumably performs some power conditioning, but still. Not great.

      • dual_sport_dork 🐧🗡️@lemmy.worldEnglish
        0·
        18 days ago

        You used the magic word, “modern.”

        Lots of houses in this world are not modern, and some of them are old enough that they were retrofitted to have electricity, as mine was, rather than even being built with it to begin with. And done so in a haphazard manner when electrical codes were either much more lax than now or didn’t exist. And further when the expected power draw for a household was considerably lower, because basically all of it in the 1920’s or whatever was only used for lighting and we didn’t have all of our current appliances, TV’s, computers, 3D printers, or even indoor space heaters.

        So moaning about what ought to be rather than what is really doesn’t accomplish anything, especially in OP’s case.

        My small house has basically the entire ground floor wired to only two 15 amp circuits.

        • Darkassassin07@lemmy.caEnglish
          0·
          18 days ago

          A lot of people aren’t even aware of the concern. That’s why I bring it up.

          Paying an electrician to add a breaker is much cheaper than replacing the PC. Tho that’s up to OC if they want to pursue that. I’m just putting the info out there for them to consider.

      • Majorllama@lemmy.worldEnglish
        0·
        18 days ago

        That’s the best part. It’s not in the kitchen. My room is on the complete opposite side of the house. Literally the furthest room from the kitchen.

        Whatever drunk moron wired the house back in the 70s did so in such a confusing manner that electricians give us the “fuck no I’m not fixing that” price when we ask them what it would cost to sort out our completely nonsensical wiring. I think the last guy we talked to quoted us 30k and he pretty much flat out told us nobody will ever want to unfuck our house.

        • alphabethunter@lemmy.worldEnglish
          0·
          17 days ago

          Do everything outside the walls. I had the same problem in my house, I literally killed all the wires inside the walls and did a whole new installation in an industrial style outside the walls. It’s way better for maintenance purposes anyway.

          • Majorllama@lemmy.worldEnglish
            01·
            17 days ago

            See I would have no problem with that but the other people living in this house would have a lot of problems with that. Namely the women. I know for a fact me and the other guys would prefer it but the ladies would never green light something that “ugly” lol.

        • dual_sport_dork 🐧🗡️@lemmy.worldEnglish
          0·
          17 days ago

          You’re in the same boat as me, except swap 70’s for 1920’s. I have to tear down all the plaster – not drywall, actual literal plaster, on lath – to get at the ground floor wiring. I decided it’s fine where it is for now.

          • Majorllama@lemmy.worldEnglish
            01·
            17 days ago

            Yeah at some point you just say fuck it and limp along until the problem is big enough that it’s time for a completely new house or you move.

            In our situation it’s one of those things where it just doesn’t seem worth it to properly address because if we are gonna have an electrician cut a bunch of holes in our walls to redo all the wiring we may as well have a plumber cut a bunch of holes in our ceiling to insulate all the pipes they installed in the ceiling crawl space without any insulation. And if we have them cutting holes in every wall and every ceiling we may as we lost have them tear the whole goddamn house down and start over properly lol.