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.
7 months later update:
I've expanded HA quite a bit and have a decent grasp on where my electricity is being used. Suspending my desktop has saved a shitload of power: under Linux, when suspended, it draws ~10W of power at any given time vs ~100W when idle. Also, I put smart plugs on the server cluster; the total usage of the entire cluster - 4 mini PCs, 1 SFF, and 5x HDDs (NAS) - over the last 7 months so far is currently at a whopping 465 kWh. That's ~66 kWh a month. Barely 5% of my monthly electrical usage.
Do you really trust your consumer grade router and firewall on the desktop?
Against random internet noise? Yes, absolutely
OK but what if you have a lava lamp that is synced to the moods of a sarcastic and greedy AI?
Security is about to get really weird. It used to be the Internet of Things we had to worry about, but now we have Things in Internet.
wtf is that 😄
But I agree, random hardware in your LAN is more of a security threat than anything coming from outside in many cases.
What about something more spooky?
Most ISP routers have sane default settings and block all incoming traffic, you don't even reach their log in interface. If they are somewhat updated you'll be fine in most cases.
Yeah. I got a pro managing it.
I'm sorry my corrections to all your many errors are bothering you.
You got a pro managing it?
\sigh