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.

  • slazer2au@lemmy.worldEnglish
    0·
    5 months ago

    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.

    • Lka1988@sh.itjust.worksOPEnglish
      0·
      5 months ago

      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.

      • AnarchoSnowPlow@midwest.socialEnglish
        0·
        5 months ago

        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.

        • Lka1988@sh.itjust.worksOPEnglish
          1·
          5 months ago

          Yep, it’s awesome. We got it for $300 from Costco to supplement the smaller chest freezer, and it’s been an absolute godsend.

  • fmstrat@lemmy.nowsci.comEnglish
    0·
    5 months ago

    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.

    • Lka1988@sh.itjust.worksOPEnglish
      0·
      5 months ago

      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 😬

        • Lka1988@sh.itjust.worksOPEnglish
          0·
          5 months ago

          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 🫤

            • Lka1988@sh.itjust.worksOPEnglish
              2·
              5 months ago

              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…

              • catloaf@lemm.eeEnglish
                1·
                5 months ago

                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.

                • Lka1988@sh.itjust.worksOPEnglish
                  1·
                  5 months ago

                  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.