Approximate power consumption?

[da_chowda]

I'd love to keep track of how much power my NAS is using on a daily/monthly basis. I realize that such a feature couldn't be totally accurate, but even a general approximation would be super nice. Is this a feature being considered?

[PsychoWards]

How do you want to do this?

There is no reliable way to measure the consumption of most of the parts, some parts are not even read be the motherboard (HDD consumption, PSU losses etc.) Your best bet is going to buy a cheap socket power meter, this does it way more reliable, you know how much is actually pulled from the socket and depending on the model you can connect it to Home Assistant for example.

[Magnus]

Hi there! It’s a great idea, but probably very difficult to implement, even as an approximation. It might be possible to get actual usage out of a connected UPS, but I’m just speculating now. 

[xSPOONx]

As @Magnus said, very difficult, without an external reading from a meter or "smart" PSU like Corsair had for a time. Without knowing what efficiency the PSU is running at, the CPU pulling 40W, the GPU pulling 30W, and the motherboard and drives doing another 30W is meaningless without knowing the efficiency of the PSU - which is going to be dynamically changing with the load. It 

https://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/corsair-rm550x-power-supply,4484-5.html

https://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/fractal-design-ion-560p-power-supply-review,6279-2.html

Below 50W even 550(ish)W PSUs fall on its face. So, that 50W indicated is more like 100W at the wall. There will be significant variation here because the PSUs efficiency is so important. This example is double. If you're constantly pulling 100W, you're around 88%-91% efficient, so you're pulling ~110W-114W at the wall depending on the PSU. A PSU that's only 80% efficient at 100W will pull closer to 125W. 

So, knowing what your components are doing only tells you part of the puzzle. There's a significant unknown variable at play that you need to account for if you want accurate readings as to what's happening. 

[Vroar]

i guess using one of those plugs is the only way. unfortunately most of those aren't very accurate

[xSPOONx]

30 minutes ago, Vroar said:

i guess using one of those plugs is the only way. unfortunately most of those aren't very accurate

A Kill-A-Watt or whatever other power monitoring device should be accurate. You need to know both the Voltage and Amperage. You can also get whole home monitors that can monitor the entire feed or individual circuits. 

[Tuvar]

If you use a UPS with some basic metrics you can also pull metrics. You'll likely need to only have the server on it, unless it can log the wattage per socket. That's getting into enterprise level UPS's though. Kill-a-Watt is the most basic option as someone commented though. Since most people have their equipment on a UPS it can give you logs over time. Depends on how much you want to invest, but some sort of UPS is highly recommended.

[ubergeek]

I use "smart plugs" Like this from Amazon to track usage. One can also use a calculator to generate costs per year. And they are really close. Like I found it would cost me 250 a year to run my 15 drive nas with a 2060 for plex usage

[Dylan]

14 minutes ago, ubergeek said:

I use "smart plugs" Like this from Amazon to track usage. One can also use a calculator to generate costs per year. And they are really close. Like I found it would cost me 250 a year to run my 15 drive nas with a 2060 for plex usage

Always on with moderate load usage?

[ubergeek]

1 hour ago, Dylan said:

Always on with moderate load usage?

I gauged with about 70% usage 

[Mawson]

3 hours ago, ubergeek said:

I use "smart plugs" Like this from Amazon to track usage. One can also use a calculator to generate costs per year. And they are really close. Like I found it would cost me 250 a year to run my 15 drive nas with a 2060 for plex usage

That link directs back to this thread

[ubergeek]

1 hour ago, Mawson said:

That link directs back to this thread

lol bad clipboard'n on my part it should be fixed now

THIS LINK WORKS

Edited January 13, 2025 by ubergeek

[jonp]

I love this idea and wonder if there is an API we could attach to that would let us report the power usage through our UI to avoid needing another app.  Definitely stickying this for the future.