this post was submitted on 05 Feb 2025
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214
Got myself some energy monitoring Zigbee plugs and made an interesting discovery (sh.itjust.works)
submitted 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago) by [email protected] to c/[email protected]
149 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.

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[–] [email protected] 5 points 22 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.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 22 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.

[–] [email protected] 7 points 21 hours ago (4 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.

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[–] [email protected] 1 points 22 hours ago

I love my old desktops that pull almost nothing.

[–] [email protected] 16 points 1 day ago (1 children)

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

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 day ago

Yeah, I noticed haha. Though I did have a big freezer some years ago that was a pretty hefty power suck... I never measured it, but it definitely affected my power bill.

[–] [email protected] 18 points 1 day ago (6 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

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 day ago

TBH I didn't think it used a whole lot at idle, what with modern manufacturing processes and all. I was fairly surprised.

[–] [email protected] 16 points 1 day 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.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 22 hours ago

Those were different times.

They are not relevant anymore with current self hosting setups.

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

Do you have a link to the plugs? I want to try the same

[–] [email protected] 6 points 1 day ago (1 children)

Sure!

https://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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[–] [email protected] 11 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago) (5 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.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 23 hours ago (1 children)

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

[–] [email protected] 2 points 22 hours ago* (last edited 8 hours ago)

Part of why I'm going with the 'T' SKU Pentium G4560T instead of the standard G4560 on my custom NAS build.

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

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 running 24/7.

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.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 day ago (1 children)

70 kW is 16€ where I live and I have around 4000 kW per year.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 day ago

Nice!

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