Yeah, I never expect a financial ROI for hobbies; the ROI for that is nothing more than my own enjoyment.

Yeah, my power bill is pretty reasonable already, considering my large family plus all the electronics I run. I just like seeing what everything is doing as a matter of curiosity.

Ah, but only one is a chest freezer 😉

That, and I used to have a freezer that was a power suck.

That’s either a really efficient PC or a really old freezer 😂

The bedrooms, including my entire master bedroom suite, each have one 15A circuit. No more. That’s how most duplex townhouses are. The lights are currently those damn CFL lights, so they aren’t exactly difficult to dim - CFLs almost do it on their own when they’re close to dying (which these ones are).

That, and it’s a rental house.

I’m eyeballing HWINFO64 right now, it’s saying my GPU is idling at ~28W and the CPU is idling at ~36W. Add a couple watts for the fans, various peripherals, and waste heat; it’s close to what I saw earlier.

The dual 1080p monitors eat up about 30W apiece on their own, when powered and actively displaying something. Barely a watt or two each when in standby mode.

It’s ~90W at idle; the plug is monitoring everything at my desk. No spinning rust, all solid state. Settings for CPU and GPU are all default at the moment. It does have an 850W PSU, but I’ve had it pulling over 700W at one point (dimming my bedroom lights), so that’s somewhat justified 😅

I’ll dig into settings later, but for now I’m good just turning it off unless I’m using it.

That’d be interesting, but I don’t plan to integrate my PC that deeply into HA, if at all.

Very nice. I don’t like laptops for gaming, but I recognize and appreciate the utility of them; I use my laptop (Thinkpad T14 G1 AMD) more than my gaming PC for most things outside of that.

Worth a look. One monitor uses HDMI, the other uses DisplayPort. They’re just cheap secondhand 1080p monitors to get me by until I toss them for an ultrawide 1440p unit.

Any time I clear out the chest freezer to defrost or get to something at the bottom, the lower half stays below freezing for quite a while. Love that little freezer.

The monitors are part of a 12W draw left after shutting off the PC. The plug is measuring everything plugged into the power strip that powers all of my desktop equipment. The PC itself was drawing ~90W at idle.

Definitely gonna check that out.

I use Kasm for remote access, I believe that has a WOL component as well. I haven’t set it up as such, but I plan to later on.

No idea. I would imagine it does, but that’s something I’ll need to check.

Very cool! However, my house is a rental, so any monitoring equipment has to be somewhat non-invasive.

Edit: it helps if I actually look at the product before spouting nonsense… Looks promising.

The PC was drawing ~90W. All solid state, no spinning rust. Lots of fans though, since it’s air-cooled. Not entirely sure what was causing the draw, but it’s definitely something I want to investigate at some point.

👀

Yeah… I know. 🙃

Yeah, anything Zigbee needs a hub of some sort that interfaces with the server. Zigbee is a mesh-like network of its own - it doesn’t use wifi or Bluetooth or anything.

I bought Nabu Casa’s Connect ZBT-1 dongle; it’s like $35 and plugs directly into the HA server. Super simple to configure as well, since HAOS detects it automatically. Plus, the smart plugs act as routers, so as long as there is a path of router-enabled devices that can see each other all the way to the dongle on the server, you shouldn’t need anything else.