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.

  • fmstrat@lemmy.nowsci.com
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    19 hours ago

    Depends on the driver. Usually for finicky ones you can do an rmmod at suspend and a modprobe on resume. What distro, and are you using the default suspend mechanism?

    • umbrella@lemmy.ml
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      19 hours ago

      yes, i’m on ubuntu, using all the default drivers.

      and i would guess its finnicky because its an old laptop.

      is it a matter of scripting rmmod and modprobe to run on suspend/wake?

      • fmstrat@lemmy.nowsci.com
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        13 hours ago

        There are a couple of ways:

        1. Formally add a system entry to run at suspend/resume (like how nvidia does in their driver package)

        Or

        1. Write a script that rmmods, suspends, sleeps, modprobes, and map it to Cntrl-Alt-Shift-S

        I usually do 2 because I like the hotkey method for desktops, and it keeps things the same for both. Also allows me to close a lid on a laptop and leave it on. But 1 is more “formal”.

        Happy to share some scripts if you’d like, on my phone now, though.

        • umbrella@lemmy.ml
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          8 hours ago

          how do i do 1? having timeout to suspend and lid close to suspend would be great. and id like to see some example scripts!

          i had pretty much given up on standby with this one.