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Got myself some energy monitoring Zigbee plugs and made an interesting discovery (sh.itjust.works)
submitted 21 hours ago* (last edited 16 hours 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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[–] PieMePlenty@lemmy.world 2 points 3 hours ago* (last edited 3 hours 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.

[–] Xanza@lemm.ee 13 points 6 hours ago (1 children)

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

[–] lka1988@sh.itjust.works 1 points 6 hours ago* (last edited 6 hours ago)

Ah, but only one is a chest freezer 😉

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

[–] Strit@lemmy.linuxuserspace.show 3 points 6 hours ago (1 children)

I also found out something interesting. My desktop uses about 1/3 of the power one of my freezers do. :)

[–] lka1988@sh.itjust.works 4 points 6 hours ago* (last edited 6 hours ago) (1 children)

That's either a really efficient PC or a really old freezer 😂

[–] Strit@lemmy.linuxuserspace.show 3 points 6 hours ago

The PC is effecient. It's not a gaming PC. It idles at around 16W and maxes out at 80'ish.

[–] fmstrat@lemmy.nowsci.com 7 points 10 hours ago (3 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.

[–] Sinthesis@lemmy.today 4 points 3 hours ago

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

What benefit does this serve in this situation?

[–] umbrella@lemmy.ml 4 points 7 hours ago

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

[–] lka1988@sh.itjust.works 8 points 9 hours 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.

[–] SaltySalamander@fedia.io 14 points 15 hours ago (1 children)

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

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[–] vividspecter@lemm.ee 4 points 11 hours ago* (last edited 11 hours ago) (2 children)

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.

I'll add though that people's perception of how much power there system is using can be skewed by software based monitoring tools. People may think there system is using only 50W because that's what software reports but it's actually drawing a 100W at the wall.

[–] lka1988@sh.itjust.works 2 points 9 hours ago* (last edited 9 hours ago) (1 children)

I'm eyeballing HWINFO64 right now, 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.

The dual 1080p monitors eat up about 30W apiece on their own, when powered and actively displaying something. Barely a watt or two each when in standby mode.

[–] Schmuppes@lemmy.today 1 points 41 minutes 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.

[–] Psythik@lemmy.world 3 points 11 hours 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.

[–] unexposedhazard@discuss.tchncs.de 13 points 15 hours 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 5 points 7 hours ago (1 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.

[–] unexposedhazard@discuss.tchncs.de 2 points 6 hours 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.

[–] SaltySalamander@fedia.io 12 points 15 hours ago (3 children)

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.com 1 points 1 hour 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!

[–] unexposedhazard@discuss.tchncs.de 3 points 6 hours ago

Suspend != boot

Even in 2010 or earlier waking a pc from suspend would have only taken 2-3 seconds because the whole system state is in RAM not on disk.

[–] Honytawk@lemmy.zip 2 points 12 hours ago

Those were different times.

They are not relevant anymore with current self hosting setups.

[–] vividspecter@lemm.ee 3 points 11 hours 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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[–] slazer2au@lemmy.world 50 points 20 hours ago (5 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 28 points 20 hours 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.works 12 points 20 hours ago* (last edited 17 hours ago) (3 children)

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.

[–] ryedaft@sh.itjust.works 7 points 19 hours ago (1 children)

Both are full so it reduces the amount of cold air that can escape when you open them.

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[–] rimjob_rainer@discuss.tchncs.de 11 points 16 hours ago* (last edited 16 hours ago) (4 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.

[–] possiblylinux127@lemmy.zip 5 points 13 hours ago (1 children)

There is a reason people opt for old desktop CPUs and SSD's

[–] lka1988@sh.itjust.works 2 points 12 hours ago

Part of why I'm going with the 'T' variant of the Pentium G4560 on my custom NAS build.

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[–] flubba86@lemmy.world 3 points 12 hours ago (2 children)

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.

[–] Psythik@lemmy.world 6 points 11 hours ago

That's nothing; my Ryzen 7000 machine uses 150w at idle. Modern high-end desktops draw a lot of power.

[–] lka1988@sh.itjust.works 2 points 12 hours ago (1 children)

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.

[–] flubba86@lemmy.world 5 points 11 hours ago (2 children)

(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.

[–] lka1988@sh.itjust.works 3 points 9 hours ago* (last edited 9 hours ago)

The bedrooms, including my entire master bedroom suite, each have one 15A circuit. No more. That's how most duplex townhouses are. The lights are currently those damn CFL lights, so they aren't exactly difficult to dim - CFLs almost do it on their own when they're close to dying (which these ones are).

That, and it's a rental house.

[–] albert180@discuss.tchncs.de 1 points 10 hours ago

Maybe he meant the act of dimming his lights trough Home Assistant?

[–] FourPacketsOfPeanuts@lemmy.world 32 points 20 hours ago* (last edited 20 hours ago) (3 children)

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

[–] lka1988@sh.itjust.works 23 points 20 hours ago* (last edited 20 hours 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 31 points 20 hours 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 26 points 20 hours 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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