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.
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.
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.
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.
Place a surge protector between the smart plug and the PC to be safe.
What benefit does this serve in this situation?
how do you deal with kb+trackpad not working after wake?
The plugs are rated for 1800W each. Should be fine. I hit 670W a bit earlier, running Furmark VK and Cinebench R23 multi-core simultaneously for shits and giggles.
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My desktop PC idles quite high as well. The semi high-end consumer motherboards on the AMD side tend to use a lot of power at idle, so I think that’s a big part of it (at least the x570 series, can’t speak for later). And as others have said, high refresh rate and multiple monitors can make things worse.
I’ll add though that people’s perception of how much power there system is using can be skewed by software based monitoring tools. People may think there system is using only 50W because that’s what software reports but it’s actually drawing a 100W at the wall.
I’m eyeballing HWINFO64 right now, it’s saying my GPU is idling at ~28W and the CPU is idling at ~36W. Add a couple watts for the fans, various peripherals, and waste heat; it’s close to what I saw earlier.
The dual 1080p monitors eat up about 30W apiece on their own, when powered and actively displaying something. Barely a watt or two each when in standby mode.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Those were different times.
They are not relevant anymore with current self hosting setups.
TBH I didn’t think it used a whole lot at idle, what with modern manufacturing processes and all. I was fairly surprised.
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.
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.
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.
Maybe he meant the act of dimming his lights trough Home Assistant?
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.
There is a reason people opt for old desktop CPUs and SSD’s
Part of why I’m going with the ‘T’ variant of the Pentium G4560 on my custom NAS build.
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.
70 kW is 16€ where I live and I have around 4000 kW per year.
Nice!
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!
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.
Speak for yourself…
Super, go on dear…
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.
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
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.
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.
Yeah. I got a pro managing it.
I love my old desktops that pull almost nothing.
Does it clock down when idle?
No idea. I would imagine it does, but that’s something I’ll need to check.
How is it possible that it draws 100W at idle? What is it even doing?
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.
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.
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.
Do you have a link to the plugs? I want to try the same
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.
