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.

  • umbrella@lemmy.ml
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    18 hours ago

    ok it worked! thanks a lot! can’t believe it was that easy. Gnome spazzes out a little bit after wake sometimes, is that something i can work around?

    do you happen to know a thing or two about diagnosing trackpad issues? or at least the right direction? 😂

    • fmstrat@lemmy.nowsci.com
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      8 hours ago

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

      What kind of issues, and which trackpad driver?

      • umbrella@lemmy.ml
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        4 hours ago

        i was about to send a screenshot, but i can’t reproduce it now. it freezes and stops responding to some or all input, and all the dock+appmenu icons are gone. its one of these or all symptoms, and i can usually reproduce it when coming back from sleep. logs say ‘broken pipe, error reading events from display’ i can update if it happens again.

        I’m using the same generic ps2 driver for the touchpad. its an old alps glidepoint, i can get it to work perfectly with all features on windows 7 with the proper drivers, needless to say thats a bit unworkable.

        on linux it works initially with multitouch scroll and everything, then gradually starts to behave like a wet touchscreen. ive tried different kernel versions, livebooted a couple different distros and tried a few very old solutions i found floating around, like using the synaptics driver for some reason. found it for cheap and replaced the hardware. nothing seems to do the trick.

        edit: it did the thing, its usually functional enough for screenshots: