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.
It has never occured to me my whole life to not suspend or shut down computers overnight. It wakes up in like 2 seconds why wouldnt you, even if it used only an extra 1W
The problem I have with this I put the PC to sleep overnight every night - and like clockwork, Windows wakes it back up sometime overnight to do… Something.
I’ve been diagnosing the issue for years - checking wake timers, switching hardware devices permissions to wake the system off. I might fix it for a few months and then a new Windows update comes along and it’s back to its usual routine of waking itself.
Looking forward to seeing if it persists with Linux when I move at the end of support period for Win10 later this year.
I have never had what you described happen in my past 15 years of using linux, i hope you find your way around things, linux is dope once you get used to it.
My PC goes down from 70W idle to 2W when suspended. I also have a master slave power strip, that turns of all my peripherals (speakers, lights, audio interface, etc) when the PC drops below 10W so that saves some extra energy.
Reliability issues with suspend-to-ram are rather common. Shutting down is an option, but session save and restore is a relatively recent thing and not supported by all desktop environments. I.e. it’s the post startup part that takes the longest.
You must be pretty young, because back in the dark days of spinning HDDs a computer would take 5+ minutes to boot.
Suspend != boot
Even in 2010 or earlier waking a pc from suspend would have only taken 2-3 seconds because the whole system state is in RAM not on disk.
Those were different times.
They are not relevant anymore with current self hosting setups.
TBH I didn’t think it used a whole lot at idle, what with modern manufacturing processes and all. I was fairly surprised.