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.
One is a smaller chest freezer, about 3 feet tall, probably 6 or 7 cubic feet if I had to guess. The other is a Hamilton Beach upright freezer from Costco. Both are full, so that helps with keeping them cold.
Both are full so it reduces the amount of cold air that can escape when you open them.
Without space between the contents, though, they freeze in phases and it affects how they come out. Watch our or just keep air gaps.
Is your upright the one with all the little compartments? That one looked to me like the most efficient upright design I’ve ever seen.
Yep, it’s awesome. We got it for $300 to supplement the smaller chest freezer, and it’s been an absolute godsend.