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.
I had a similar revelation. Home assistant has a WOL component, so you can set that up for easy starts. I’ve had mixed success with mechanisms to get HA to sleep the computer, though.
Ideally I want the machine to be sleeping I’d I’m not using it.
I use Kasm for remote access, I believe that has a WOL component as well. I haven’t set it up as such, but I plan to later on.
If you get a reliable way to sleep a windows machine via MQTT (not sure if that’s a route you’d take) but I’d be super interested in hearing about it.
I use HASS.agent to help manage my Windows desktop and expose various sensors to HA. It can suspend or hibernate the system. It does use MQTT as its connectivity plane.
Oh nice, I’ll give that a shot. I was using IOTlink but the service wasn’t reliable on my machine and needed to be restarted constantly…
I’ll give HASS.agent a shot! Thanks
That’d be interesting, but I don’t plan to integrate my PC that deeply into HA, if at all.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Yeah, no amount of UPS is gonna fix a problem like that. It’s more than time to rewire their whole electrical grid at home. That’s quite literally a disaster waiting to happen.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
I also found out something interesting. My desktop uses about 1/3 of the power one of my freezers do. :)
That’s either a really efficient PC or a really old freezer 😂
The PC is effecient. It’s not a gaming PC. It idles at around 16W and maxes out at 80’ish.
What res is that monitor ? My 2k monitor is pretty hungry compared to my old 1080. Even just looking at the uk energy efficiency ratings for 4k tells shocks me !
Right now I just run dual 1080p. I plan on upgrading to a 120Hz+ 1440p ultrawide at some point, but priorities… My entire desk setup is currently consuming 12 watts with the PC shut off. That’s ~90W just from the PC.
So my partner and I use laptops (small flat) so really sip power compared to the 65 watt of the monitor
Very nice. I don’t like laptops for gaming, but I recognize and appreciate the utility of them; I use my laptop (Thinkpad T14 G1 AMD) more than my gaming PC for most things outside of that.
Is your GPU reducing the VRAM frequency when it’s idle?
If the vertical timing is different between the monitors, the VRAM will have to run at maximum speed all the time and that can add 20 watts or more to your idle power consumption.
No idea, honestly, it’s just the default settings. I haven’t really had any time to tinker and optimize it to my liking for a while.
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 😬
Have you considered putting your children in one of the storage freezers? /s
👀
Measuring my server cluster
Personally, I just don’t ask questions I don’t want the answer to.
Speak for yourself…
Super, go on dear…
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 🫤
I see your 4-bay docking station and raise my 20-bay storage server. I even stopped counting how much the hardware costs for it :p
raise my 20-bay storage server.
I raise you my 72 bay monster… https://www.ebay.com/itm/126301431412
But I have 512 GB of ram in mine…
It’s attached via USB to a 2014-era Mac Mini running OMV; it’s a dedicated NAS and nothing else. Honestly not a huge fan of that hardware setup at this point, as the Proxmox cluster running all of my VMs and whatnot sees it drop out periodically for absolutely no reason. I’ve already tweaked the network adapter within the OS to stay powered on, because apparently Apple hardware has a mind of its own and just decides to shut various components off for “power saving” reasons.
The kicker is that I’m upgrading it to a 7th-gen based server soon. My dad gave me an old Pentium 4-powered HP Proliant DL110 last year, the case of which has 10x 3.5" drive bays, and is fully ATX compatible, so I’m gonna drop in a 7th gen mobo with Pentium G4560T (already have that on my desk), a newer PSU, and an HBA card. Don’t need a ton of processing power for a dedicated NAS running OMV - just a lot of expansion capacity.
You might need to lower your expectations
Yeah… I know. 🙃
Lat I checked, it was 40w idle for me on the kill-o-watt. Spinny rust and all!
This gave me a serious chuckle… BC I deff considered it. Or keeping the box on balcony in the winter to get few more fps back in the day
A fridge can create a fairly low overall temp, but with something like a PC generating a ton of heat inside, it can’t keep up. The fridge just can’t move the heat fast enough and becomes an insulated box trapping the heat instead.
Those storage freezers are doing nothing the vast majority of the time. Not really a fair comparison.
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.
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?
Is your gaming PC air gapped from the internet??
No. What kind of attack are you afraid of by idling a computer connected to your ISP router?
Any program on your PC that maintains or frequently initiates outbound connections, other machines on your LAN spreading an infection, literally any Trojan, etc. Double that if you haven’t disabled UPnP on your ISP router which is probably on by default.
If you are afraid of your PC infecting itself by background outbound connections, you should not turn it on at all. Running 24h vs 6h a day barely makes a difference in this regard - yes, there are fewer “random internet noise attacks” in less hours, but if your LAN is that dangerous, the computer should not be on for 5 minutes. Either you trust your LAN enough to have a computer running, or not.
Double that if you haven’t disabled UPnP on your ISP router which is probably on by default.
Talking about the sane defaults I mentioned earlier - my router has it off as a default. But if it wasn’t, my approach wouldn’t be to turn devices off¹ but change the router setting.
¹ I actually do turn off/plane mode all my non-server devices when I’m not using them but not for that reason.
You’re totally right, not turning it on at all would be safer. But we do need to use them so it makes sense to turn it on while in use. Security is only good up to the point of it making your machine unusable. Most of the attacks you see on running computers by happens overnight anyway, or otherwise when your machine is sitting idle not in use. Plus it gives you the opportunity to witness odd behavior if it were to happen while you’re using it.
And no, you should never trust your LAN in the year of our lord 2025. We are well beyond that in the cybersecurity landscape and have been for 10+ years. Zero Trust is the name of the game. If a device is on, and connected to the internet, it’s a target, as are any other devices on that network. Pretend that is not the case at
Do you really trust your consumer grade router and firewall on the desktop?
Against random internet noise? Yes, absolutely
What about something more spooky?
Most ISP routers have sane default settings and block all incoming traffic, you don’t even reach their log in interface. If they are somewhat updated you’ll be fine in most cases.
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.
wtf is that 😄
But I agree, random hardware in your LAN is more of a security threat than anything coming from outside in many cases.
Yeah. I got a pro managing it.
I love my old desktops that pull almost nothing.
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.
That’s nothing; my Ryzen 7000 machine uses 150w at idle. Modern high-end desktops draw a lot of power.
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.
(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.
Maybe he meant the act of dimming his lights trough Home Assistant?
Most rented bedrooms in my area dont even have built-in lighting. Its all floor and table lamps, usually on a smart outlet these days
Major issue lol short circuit or too thin of wire/breaker, old house probably. Instant dim and back to normal turning on a heavy appliance can happen as the power circuit lags but it’s a mere fraction of a second.
So to turn on an appliance I’m pretty sure it takes 3000 watts to cycle on then reduces to say 1500 watts to operate a normal 1500w appliance. Nothing should ever continuously dim lights. Major fire hazard if so.
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.
I bought two “Eightree” brand Zigbee-compatible plugs to see how they fare.
Did you need a Zigbee hub to get them working? I was gifted an Eighttree Zigbee plug with energy monitoring, but it seems to require using a hardware hub :(
Yeah, anything Zigbee needs a hub of some sort that interfaces with the server. Zigbee is a mesh-like network of its own - it doesn’t use wifi or Bluetooth or anything.
I bought Nabu Casa’s Connect ZBT-1 dongle; it’s like $35 and plugs directly into the HA server. Super simple to configure as well, since HAOS detects it automatically. Plus, the smart plugs act as routers, so as long as there is a path of router-enabled devices that can see each other all the way to the dongle on the server, you shouldn’t need anything else.
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
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.
Did you check the bios?
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.
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.
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.
At least until MS muddied the waters with “hibernate”.
TBH I didn’t think it used a whole lot at idle, what with modern manufacturing processes and all. I was fairly surprised.
monitors
Don’t underestimate the power draw of multiple monitors.
But while you’re at it: simply turn off different devices on the same power strip and check what actually draws how much.
The PC itself was drawing ~90 watts. The current draw right now - dual 1080p monitors, HA server, a 5-port switch, and a couple other small things - is about 12 watts. Desk power measurement is the yellow line, freezers are the blue line.
A fun one to put in perspective how hideously power hungry modern desktop PCs are is that I have an old (ish) laptop running as a local Plex server that also has a LLM loaded in there and a few other docker bits and pieces and it just sits happily humming at 10W idle (which is as much as my TV draws when it’s turned off).
I’ve looked into building a small form factor PC to replace it at some point but all the spare parts I have lying around would draw as much idle as when that tiny thing is going full tilt and I just can’t justify it for something that just stays on waiting for me to feel like rewatching The Matrix or whatever.
Laptops are pretty good at that. I run a few 7th and 8th gen 35W mini PCs in my server cluster (i7-7700T/i7-8700T), so hopefully that helps.
Yeah, I guess that’s how mini PCs got popular in the first place. Just cram a laptop in a box, get most of the performance and less of the hassle. At a premium, of course, so I imagine on the manufacturing side it’s quite the win/win.
Still, a 10x multiplier in power consumption at idle and over 5x under load is pretty wild.
Yeah for real. Cheap and plentiful on eBay as well. That’s where I get mine, and company surplus.
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.
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.
Evaporative clay-pot coolers are also top-load for efficiency.
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.
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 to supplement the smaller chest freezer, and it’s been an absolute godsend.
Both are full so it reduces the amount of cold air that can escape when you open them.
Without space between the contents, though, they freeze in phases and it affects how they come out. Watch out or just keep air gaps.
How is it possible that it draws 100W at idle? What is it even doing?
Hard drives, especially spinning discs, and RAM are probably the biggest factor at idle. I dropped my servers’ idle draw from 220w to 180w by dropping it’s RAM and replacing some older drives.
People underestimate how more RAM can be more power usage.
The PC was drawing ~90W. All solid state, no spinning rust. Lots of fans though, since it’s air-cooled. Not entirely sure what was causing the draw, but it’s definitely something I want to investigate at some point.
Check your GPU power usage, I remember seeing people complaining about theirs not clocking down if they had a second monitor plugged in, and similar bugs
Worth a look. One monitor uses HDMI, the other uses DisplayPort. They’re just cheap secondhand 1080p monitors to get me by until I toss them for an ultrawide 1440p unit.
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 :)
That’s certainly one way to do it…
