this post was submitted on 05 Feb 2025
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240
Got myself some energy monitoring Zigbee plugs and made an interesting discovery (sh.itjust.works)
submitted 3 days ago* (last edited 3 days ago) by [email protected] to c/[email protected]
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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.

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[–] [email protected] 4 points 2 days ago (2 children)

I also found out something interesting. My desktop uses about 1/3 of the power one of my freezers do. :)

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[–] [email protected] 5 points 2 days ago* (last edited 2 days ago) (2 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 2 days ago

My X670E system also uses a shitload of power. Literally 150w at idle, no matter what I do. Tried disabling every unnecessary feature in the BIOS and enabling all the energy efficient settings I can find, to no avail. Drives me nuts.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 2 days ago* (last edited 2 days ago) (1 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 2 days ago

36 Watts idle sounds like a lot for a 5800X3D. I'll see what my 5700X3D does, never checked that. Not in software and not at the wall.

[–] [email protected] 9 points 3 days 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.

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[–] [email protected] 5 points 2 days ago (2 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 2 days ago (5 children)

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.

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[–] [email protected] 8 points 3 days 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.

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[–] [email protected] 5 points 3 days ago (5 children)

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

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[–] [email protected] 5 points 3 days ago (3 children)

Does it clock down when idle?

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[–] [email protected] 3 points 2 days ago (1 children)

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

[–] [email protected] 6 points 2 days 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.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 2 days ago

Ah shit, I need 240v lol

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