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No airconditioning, still on gas for heating/cooking. My “idle” of my house is 58 watt (no fridge running)”.



I have two rooms with air conditioning but use them like 3 weeks a year (Jan/February is hot in Cape Town but you can do fine without AC). Also using gas for cooking, and heating is either via gas or wood burning stove. So your power consumption astounds me. I need to maybe just go and measure what my bits and bobs are doing. I'm afraid just my network/home server rack is >58W htough.


I have no idea why your number is so high. If it's not heating or AC, if you do run a small server room, that can explain things.

To be frank, my consumption was already quite lower, but I've made quite a lot of changes to reduce energy consumption even more.

I ran a custom x96 router/fw that I replaced with a $60 Mikrotik router that also replaces a separate switch. I've replaced more power-hungry computers with energy-efficient ones.

My existing server setup ~500Watt continously would likely take up 10KWh a day, but this is my magic trick: I don't need them 24/7. So they are off, and only turned on when required (remotely with WoL / remote power switch). The rest of what I need is on several Raspberry Pi 4B+ devices (I was lucky to buy a ton when we still could).


Our washing machine, etc seems to run non stop so it's not hard to chow a few kWh's a day. But yeah I think it's in everyone's responsibility to try to optimize and analyze one's power usage. It's also fascinating. I like your "lazily loaded" server setup.


Thanks, the washing machine does explain things indeed. In the end, if it’s mostly on solar, it matters not that much. I don’t know.




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