Hi,
I spent £50 with the aim to better monitor how much leccy I’m using and where and when.
I already had a house wide monitor using a Shelly EM.
I wanted NO-CLOUD plug monitoring and finally (might have been on here), found “LocalBytes”, who currently sell a 13amp** smart plug with energy monitoring, running Tasmota. Works a charm out of the box.
Where I put the smart plugs was (I felt) the smart bit. There were too many things in my house which were just left on standby. This is fine, I thought, a handful of watts. I had adapted an approach in the office where by everything in the room which did not need to be running when I left the room was powered from a plug socket at the door. On the way out I can hit that one switch and 70% of the room dies leaving the server, networking and PCs powered. Even the monitors go off.
So I adopted this idea in the livingroom and bedroom and installed the smart plugs there. These can be controlled from a button beside the light switch. Press it on leaving and all standby power stops.
I actually found that, dormant, skeleton power was something like:
Livingroom: 20W - sleeping PC, standby tele, hifi amplifier, network (leaf) switch.
Bedroom: 18W - same again minus the amp.
Office non-essential: 100W (but already disconnectable)
Office essential: anywhere from 50W overnight to 500W while gaming.
Over all my average electrical usage was nearly 500W. I have now lowered that to 250W using what I have learnt from this project.
The “Office essential” plug includes the main office PC. My gaming PC. 5800X, 3080, 32Gb. Draws 105W idle. 250W in a light game and 500W in a full AAA+ title. However it is that 105W idle that hurts the most. While I’m working (from home) I only use it for forums and YT videos. Yet a 20W laptop can do that. So I brought an old mini-pc out of storage and have started using that during the day and only turning on the BIG PC for gaming for an hour here and there. That has saved me a bit of non-negligible money.
The tech:
Localbytes plugs w/ Tasmota, configured for MQTT.
Shelly EM current transformer monitor configured for MQTT.
Mosquitto local MQTT server.
Tiny Python script to push mqtt messages to InfluxDB
Grafana to monitor.
Zigbee2MQTT with the Zigazigzag(?) dongle with zigbee buttons for control.
Some pretty pictures:
In terms of HA involvement. It picks up the sensors and buttons mostly via MQTT entities, or I add them manually, works fine.
In the UK it will cost about 40p per kwh this winter. To run a 100W load like an idling 24/7 running gaming PC will cost you approximately £30 a month.
** I wouldn’t trust it with half that without verifying the interior.
