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.

  • fmstrat@lemmy.nowsci.comEnglish
    1·
    5 days ago

    Depends on the driver. Usually for finicky ones you can do an rmmod at suspend and a modprobe on resume. What distro, and are you using the default suspend mechanism?

    • umbrella@lemmy.mlEnglish
      1·
      5 days ago

      yes, i’m on ubuntu, using all the default drivers.

      and i would guess its finnicky because its an old laptop.

      is it a matter of scripting rmmod and modprobe to run on suspend/wake?

      • fmstrat@lemmy.nowsci.comEnglish
        1·
        5 days ago

        There are a couple of ways:

        1. Formally add a system entry to run at suspend/resume (like how nvidia does in their driver package)

        Or

        1. Write a script that rmmods, suspends, sleeps, modprobes, and map it to Cntrl-Alt-Shift-S

        I usually do 2 because I like the hotkey method for desktops, and it keeps things the same for both. Also allows me to close a lid on a laptop and leave it on. But 1 is more “formal”.

        Happy to share some scripts if you’d like, on my phone now, though.

        • umbrella@lemmy.mlEnglish
          1·
          4 days ago

          how do i do 1? having timeout to suspend and lid close to suspend would be great. and id like to see some example scripts!

          i had pretty much given up on standby with this one.

            • umbrella@lemmy.mlEnglish
              1·
              2 hours ago

              what kind of driver could the keyboard be using? lsmod shows nothing beyond the HID driver, but thats being used by the external mouse which works normally after sleep.

              lshw shows it going by /dev/input/event6 or something like it?

              • fmstrat@lemmy.nowsci.comEnglish
                1·
                5 hours ago

                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.

                • umbrella@lemmy.mlEnglish
                  1·
                  1 hour 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? 😂