Home Assistant can be a great way to connect all your smart home devices and even save some money in the process, thanks to the power of automations and integrated entities. But it’s not always positive with such a deployment. If you’re not careful, you could end up using more energy than you otherwise assumed. The same goes for a house without Home Assistant, which is where power monitoring comes into play. I rely on smart plugs with energy monitoring and realized some surprising things.
Monitors draw a lot of power
50 W is a big deal
I’ve got a 32-inch UHD primary display, accompanied by a 27-inch QHD configured vertically. When building a PC and planning out an office, we always have power consumption in mind for all the components inside the chassis. But what we (or at least I) failed to take into account was all the power drawn by monitors. I didn’t realize they sucked so much with both my screens totalling more than 100W watts. I’ve wasted so much power keeping the vertical screen active when it could have been turned off at times.
This also goes for all other accessories and hardware connected to my PC. I used to run a second system for capturing gameplay, and that alone would draw another 100W at idle, which was the case for an hour or so between sessions. It’s little things like that which increase energy draw by a small amount, but can compound over time to result in quite the monthly waste. Knowing how much power each strip is pulling allows me to adjust habits and how I use technology in smarter ways.
House insulation is vital
Seasonal patterns matter less than you think
This differs depending on where you happen to reside, but for the UK, home insulation is vital in any quest to use less power. It doesn’t matter if it’s the cold winter months or blissfully bright sunshine, your house will use a lot of energy to maintain a suitable environment for storing food and keep you feeling comfortable. Sure, your heating will fire up during colder days, which uses a lot of energy, but your refrigerator (and HVAC) will do the same on warmer days.
Monitoring how much power is being drawn by these devices will ensure you can keep tabs on what uses the most and plan accordingly. For instance, should your heating need to use considerably more power for longer periods, it may suggest your home requires better insulation. Likewise with warmer days. Should you use more power in the summer, try adjusting how (and when) you open windows and utilize blinds and curtains to keep as much heat out as possible.
Create a smarter home
Too much automation can do harm
After setting up Home Assistant for the first time and connecting it to a few devices, the immediate urge to automate absolutely everything can be difficult to ignore, but it’s important you do so. By creating too many automations through Home Assistant, you risk using more energy than you may otherwise save over non-smart hardware. You’ve got to be smart with configuring the automation, too. Having bulbs activate with motion is great … so long as the sun is set.
Then some automations could hurt other parts of your household energy efficiency, causing you to use more power to maintain suitable and comfortable conditions. Let’s have a quick chat about smart blinds and curtains. These are great for automatically adjusting light levels in a room, but should it be rather chilly outside and no sun is shining in on a winter morning, opening up the view too early could cause slightly more heat to leave your home. It’s little things like this that should be considered.
AMD Threadripper is efficient
More cores, but not more power
Okay, before you sound off in the comments, a TDP of 350W and a maximum pull of around that marker isn’t great for power efficiency, but when we’re talking 64 cores and 128 threads, that power requirement starts to look a little more enticing. I used to run multiple servers within a cabinet, each pulling just north of 100W, so we were looking at around 300W at near idle, pushing to 500W when under load.
Consolidating my entire Proxmox rack into a single PC chassis allowed me to cut power draw considerably. With just one processor, motherboard, and power supply running, I cut daily energy usage by Proxmox by 60%. Throw in support for installing larger consumer-grade GPUs like an RTX 4060 Ti and RTX 3060 Ti, and now we have one machine that could run AI inference through Ollama and OpenWeb UI and detection for Frigate.
There are some drawbacks with this approach, namely the lack of redundancy, but neither was my three-server array. While I did enjoy purchasing used server equipment from classified sites, having more standard off-the-shelf parts within my server makes maintenance and sourcing replacement components much easier. This minimizes downtime and let’s be honest, I’m not running a datacenter with paying clients for maximum availability.
Monitor your energy usage for a smarter home
Running something like Home Assistant or some other proprietary solution can provide the illusion of a smart home, but without knowing how much energy various devices are using throughout the day, you’re going to be left in the dark when looking through your energy bill. After starting to monitor more power usage at home, I discovered a few things that helped adjust how we do things around the house to maximize efficiency and save money.
