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.
Couple of thoughts:
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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.
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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?
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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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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
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?
