Homeassistant power consumption desktop PC

Hardware
1

Hello all

I have HA running on an ubuntu server with an energy meter sitting on the mains power supply. I am getting an idle power consumption of 45W for this setup.

It has a 1.8TB Seagate HDD, WIFI dongle and an optical drive connected (although the optical drive is doing nothing).

Does this sound right in terms of power consumption? Is there anything I can do in ubuntu or BIOS to lower this further? I have an ASrock motherboard.

2

Looks fairly regular for a desktop PC.

I don’t think there’s much you can do to further lower that. Maybe the BIOS offers some options that allow the devices to sleep more often. But even then I don’t think it will go much lower. If the mainboard has an onboard GPU and also a regular graphics card plugged in, take out the graphics card (if you don’t need it for hardware acceleration). And unplug the optical drive if you don’t need it.

If you really want to reduce power consumption more, you probably have to switch to another system.

From the top of my head some rough numbers I have seen on different devices (when almost idle):

  • Raspberry Pi 3: ~5W
  • Intel NUC with i5 CPU + attached USB HDD: ~13W
  • Dell PowerEdge T40 (16GB RAM, 1x NVME + 2x SATA HDD): ~26W
  • Desktop PC with Intel i7 CPU (16 GB RAM, 1x NVME + 1x HDD + ATI GPU): ~50W
1 Like
3

Thanks for the response! That confirms what I need

4

Use SSD HDD.

My setup i7-1065G7, 1 TB SSD. Windows server, HA in VM = 11W

5

Your power usage has more to do with your processor being a mobile (laptop) processor than your storage choice. A 15w TDP vs a 65-95w TDP on a typical desktop model makes a difference.

(Yes I know TDP doesn’t directly relate to power consumption but it’s a decent indicator)

SSDs typically use less than a HDD but processor and power supply efficiency make a bigger difference IMO.