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.

7 months later update:

I've expanded HA quite a bit and have a decent grasp on where my electricity is being used. Suspending my desktop has saved a shitload of power: under Linux, when suspended, it draws ~10W of power at any given time vs ~100W when idle. Also, I put smart plugs on the server cluster; the total usage of the entire cluster - 4 mini PCs, 1 SFF, and 5x HDDs (NAS) - over the last 7 months so far is currently at a whopping 465 kWh. That's ~66 kWh a month. Barely 5% of my monthly electrical usage.

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[–] 60 points 2 years ago (3 children)

What kind of freezers are they? I hear that top loading freezers are quite efficient because the cool doesn't escape when it gets opened like a front loading one.

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  • [–] 34 points 2 years ago

    That's true; once everything inside is brought down to temp, they use very little power to stay cold.

    My regular fridge uses ~500-800wh a day (depending on how much it got opened). My chest freezer though, uses ~200wh/day pretty consistently.

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  • [–] [S] 15 points 2 years ago* (last edited 2 years ago) (2 children)

    One is a smaller chest freezer, about 3 feet tall, probably 6 or 7 cubic feet if I had to guess. The other is a Hamilton Beach upright freezer from Costco. Both are full, so that helps with keeping them cold.

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  • [–] 4 points 2 years ago (1 child)

    Is your upright the one with all the little compartments? That one looked to me like the most efficient upright design I've ever seen.

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  • [–] 4 points 2 years ago (2 children)

    And why the old "ice boxes" are top load only. And why most boat fridges/freezers are top-load, because energy is scares/finite when disconnected from power.

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