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.
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 😬
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!
Last.
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 🫤
You might need to lower your expectations
FYI - the cluster is pulling 115-140 watts.
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...
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.
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.