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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[+] 0 points 2 years ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 child)
  • [–] 2 points 2 years ago (3 children)

    Will grab some when I back, but assuming you are using systemd, it's easy if you follow this old but good method: https://blog.christophersmart.com/2016/05/11/running-scripts-before-and-after-suspend-with-systemd/

    If that doesn't work out of the box, it's likely because you're hitting S1 instead of S3, but give that test script a shot and let me know how it goes!

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  • [+] 0 points 2 years ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 child)
  • [–] 1 point 2 years ago (1 child)

    Could be internal to kernel? Try updating /etc/default/grub to include: GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX_DEFAULT="quiet splash atkbd.reset" and run sudo update-grub. This will cause a full keyboard reset on resume.

    If you have not run BIOS updates, that could be it, too.

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  • [+] 0 points 2 years ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 child)
  • [–] 2 points 2 years ago (1 child)

    Glad that worked out for you 😉 What is Gnome doing exactly?

    What kind of issues, and which trackpad driver?

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