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.
100W while idling seems like way too much?
Edit: maybe not, they list 75W for whole system idle here with 5800X3D.
What unhealthy eating habit are you indulging in at 21:45?
Current spike from both freezers starting up
If it gets the wife approval you know you are on to something
Chest freezers are exceptionally energy efficient. It’s not a very good comparison.
Ah, but only one is a chest freezer 😉
That, and I used to have a freezer that was a power suck.
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
You must be pretty young, because back in the dark days of spinning HDDs a computer would take 5+ minutes to boot.
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!Those were different times.
They are not relevant anymore with current self hosting setups.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Both are full so it reduces the amount of cold air that can escape when you open them.
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.
Yep, it’s awesome. We got it for $300 from Costco to supplement the smaller chest freezer, and it’s been an absolute godsend.
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.
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.
how do you deal with kb+trackpad not working after wake?
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?
yes, i’m on ubuntu, using all the default drivers.
and i would guess its finnicky because its an old laptop.
is it a matter of scripting rmmod and modprobe to run on suspend/wake?
There are a couple of ways:
- Formally add a system entry to run at suspend/resume (like how nvidia does in their driver package)
Or
- Write a script that rmmods, suspends, sleeps, modprobes, and map it to Cntrl-Alt-Shift-S
I usually do 2 because I like the hotkey method for desktops, and it keeps things the same for both. Also allows me to close a lid on a laptop and leave it on. But 1 is more “formal”.
Happy to share some scripts if you’d like, on my phone now, though.
how do i do 1? having timeout to suspend and lid close to suspend would be great. and id like to see some example scripts!
i had pretty much given up on standby with this one.
Will grab some when I back, but assuming you are using
systemd, it’s easy if you follow this old but good method: https://blog.christophersmart.com/2016/05/11/running-scripts-before-and-after-suspend-with-systemd/If that doesn’t work out of the box, it’s likely because you’re hitting S1 instead of S3, but give that test script a shot and let me know how it goes!
what kind of driver could the keyboard be using? lsmod shows nothing beyond the HID driver, but thats being used by the external mouse which works normally after sleep.
lshw shows it going by /dev/input/event6 or something like it?
deleted by creator
-
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.
Very cool! However, my house is a rental, so any monitoring equipment has to be somewhat non-invasive.
Edit: it helps if I actually look at the product before spouting nonsense… Looks promising.
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. It can all be removed just as easily.
just
Uh oh. Red flag.
gotta pop the panel cover off,
This may be where the rental agreement is broken. Define ‘pop’ . Two hands and a tool? Clear it with the landlord first. The company running the 400-unit building where I am now is gonna say F No.
Spaces before a full stop? Really?
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?
Plus PC that’s idling is just adding an attack surface IMHO
This tinfoil getting hella tight lately 🥲
How, if it’s not exposed to the internet? Burglars?
Do you really trust your consumer grade router and firewall on the desktop?
Yeah. I got a pro managing it.
I’m sorry my corrections to all your many errors are bothering you.
You got a pro managing it?
\sigh
Against random internet noise? Yes, absolutely
OK but what if you have a lava lamp that is synced to the moods of a sarcastic and greedy AI?
Security is about to get really weird. It used to be the Internet of Things we had to worry about, but now we have Things in Internet.
Have you considered putting your gaming pc in one of the storage freezers? /s
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 😬
Measuring my server cluster
Personally, I just don’t ask questions I don’t want the answer to.
Lat I checked, it was 40w idle for me on the kill-o-watt. Spinny rust and all!
Last.
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 🫤
You might need to lower your expectations
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…
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.
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.
