this post was submitted on 05 Feb 2025
200 points (97.6% liked)

Selfhosted

41829 readers
1164 users here now

A place to share alternatives to popular online services that can be self-hosted without giving up privacy or locking you into a service you don't control.

Rules:

  1. Be civil: we're here to support and learn from one another. Insults won't be tolerated. Flame wars are frowned upon.

  2. No spam posting.

  3. Posts have to be centered around self-hosting. There are other communities for discussing hardware or home computing. If it's not obvious why your post topic revolves around selfhosting, please include details to make it clear.

  4. Don't duplicate the full text of your blog or github here. Just post the link for folks to click.

  5. Submission headline should match the article title (don’t cherry-pick information from the title to fit your agenda).

  6. No trolling.

Resources:

Any issues on the community? Report it using the report flag.

Questions? DM the mods!

founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
 

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.

(page 2) 50 comments
sorted by: hot top controversial new old
[–] MudMan@fedia.io 27 points 23 hours ago (14 children)

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?

load more comments (14 replies)
[–] ryannathans@aussie.zone 3 points 19 hours ago (1 children)

Do you have a link to the plugs? I want to try the same

[–] lka1988@sh.itjust.works 5 points 19 hours ago (1 children)

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.

load more comments (1 replies)
[–] JASN_DE@lemmy.world 7 points 1 day ago (5 children)

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.

load more comments (5 replies)
[–] Darkassassin07@lemmy.ca 6 points 23 hours ago (4 children)

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.

load more comments (4 replies)
[–] possiblylinux127@lemmy.zip 1 points 16 hours ago

I love my old desktops that pull almost nothing.

[–] SweetMylk@lemm.ee 5 points 23 hours ago (3 children)

Does it clock down when idle?

load more comments (3 replies)
[–] cygnus@lemmy.ca 4 points 23 hours ago (5 children)

How is it possible that it draws 100W at idle? What is it even doing?

load more comments (5 replies)
[–] Windex007@lemmy.world 3 points 22 hours ago (5 children)

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.

load more comments (5 replies)
[–] Codilingus@sh.itjust.works 3 points 22 hours ago (2 children)

It will help some, and will also help temps, but AMD hardware does well with undervolting, especially the 5800X3D. I undervolt mine, and read the consensus that - 30 across all cores should be achievable for anyone, unless they're really, really unlucky. My 6800 XT I also only run @ 92% Voltage, and it runs cooler and faster now, too.

load more comments (2 replies)
load more comments
view more: ‹ prev next ›