Power consumption update: Halved my power usage in four months

Post 00030 | January 22nd 2023

The results are in! This is basically an update to post 00018, where I went on a bit of a electricity diet after a (prepare for a pun) shocking electricity bill. My initial action was to unplug all the things which while effective, wasn't at all practical. Instead I've made some changes that for the most part manages to improve my quality of life while still saving power!

Here are a couple things I focused on:

• As I've written about in my previous post, I have upgraded my TV setup. It used to consume about 70W without doing anything. Now, with a couple of wifi-enabled relays things are only powered on while I use them.

• I've installed Home Assistant on a Raspberry Pi. I mainly use it to control my light as well as the aforementioned relays, although it is capable of so much more. I have always been vary of home automation, but as long as I stick to local, open source stuff, I am able to lay my fears to rest. Lights are motion controlled, meaning they turn on as soon as you enter the room, like they do in The Sims. I have a lot more light because of it; Rather than having one bright ceiling light, I am instead utilising every lamp in the room, albeit at only 10-50% brightness. It really does make a difference having bright surroundings during the dark months.

• My big project of 2021 was to build a big home server that did everything; Apart from being a file server, it was also ready to stream my media and games whilst also being a full-fledged gaming PC. It was perfect, but used silly amounts of power 24-7. A Ryzen 3950X and a GTX 1080 sipping power on the off chance that at some point I needed entertainment. Instead, I replaced the duo with an Athlon 200GE; It has a TDP of about a third of its predecessor even though it has built-in graphics. It's not powerful at all, but it's good enough to for serving files, hosting docker containers and streaming media (the internal graphics are able to transcode media when needed). It doesn't leave any headroom for gaming so instead I transplanted the 3950X and GTX 1080 into a different PC, one I turn on when I need it. I cheaped out on fans on purpose, to make sure I turn the thing off when I'm done with it.

• Salads are great! They are quick, versatile and require little to no cooking. You can usually whip up something faster than you can heat a pan or an oven and there's very little to wash up afterwards.

So, has it worked? Like a charm, it has! Here's the graph directly from my power company. As you can see, from August to December, I was able to halve my power consumption:

Have I saved much money then? Not as much as you would have assumed, no. I was obviously not the only one who received a big electricity bill last summer. It seems like power-related penny-pinched has become a national past-time, which means demand (and thereby cost) is kept to a minimum. In fact, a kWh was on average cheaper in November 2022 compared to 2021.

Do I regret doing this then? Not at all. The electricity bill pointed out I was being a power hog. My investments might not pay themselves back as quickly as I could have hoped, I have done my part. As a country we have collectively averted a crisis by only consuming what we need. Also, my introduction to home automation has brought a lot of quality of life improvements. I'd say the pros outweighs the negatives.