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.

    • tofuwabohu@slrpnk.netEnglish
      21·
      11 hours ago

      No. What kind of attack are you afraid of by idling a computer connected to your ISP router?

      • Encrypt-Keeper@lemmy.worldEnglish
        2·
        11 hours ago

        Any program on your PC that maintains or frequently initiates outbound connections, other machines on your LAN spreading an infection, literally any Trojan, etc. Double that if you haven’t disabled UPnP on your ISP router which is probably on by default.

        • tofuwabohu@slrpnk.netEnglish
          11·
          11 hours ago

          If you are afraid of your PC infecting itself by background outbound connections, you should not turn it on at all. Running 24h vs 6h a day barely makes a difference in this regard - yes, there are fewer “random internet noise attacks” in less hours, but if your LAN is that dangerous, the computer should not be on for 5 minutes. Either you trust your LAN enough to have a computer running, or not.

          Double that if you haven’t disabled UPnP on your ISP router which is probably on by default.

          Talking about the sane defaults I mentioned earlier - my router has it off as a default. But if it wasn’t, my approach wouldn’t be to turn devices off¹ but change the router setting.

          ¹ I actually do turn off/plane mode all my non-server devices when I’m not using them but not for that reason.