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Running on Low Power

In my country, the price of energy is getting higher day by day: the price of the kilowatt per hour increases more and more and has no limits.

At home, we don't use not much energy: we try to have everything turned off, even the lights and in general we don't use the microwave. We do not have a dishwasher or dryer or even a oven. On this hot summer we arent using the kitchen either because we always eat fresh vegetable salads and drink only water.

However, there was something that worried to me, and this concern comes from the energy consumption of my daily-basis setup.

This setup consists of two 27" curved gaming monitors with lots of LEDs and with QHD/166Hz screens. The main computer is a MinisForum's UM700 MiniPC with a "modest" AMD CPU, upgraded to full specs. This computer is fully hosted with a keyboard and a mouse, both with many LEDs and colors and with another peripherals such as an external sound card, webcam, joysticks and external drives. Also I have two gigabit ports (both in use) and almost every port is connected to something.

Since I'm a sysadmin and most of my work is done through the different cloud providers tools -not very power-hungry tools-, my requirements are relatively low. I'm actually used to work from the console and I rarely use a browser but, you know it, sometimes you wanted to watch some videos streams that can't be watched directly with some video player and you need a browser.

In this test I've disconnected and unplugged everything but the necessary to operate in (I have more computers, network switches, speakers connected to the same line).

The complete setup, on a normal work day, consumes approximately ~130W per hour, with everything up and running at the same time and not even at full throttle.

I have managed to power down all until get 90-110W per hour by lowering the brightness from the monitors and turning off absolutely all the LEDS and "gamer" things from my peripherals but again, is not even at full throttle. I can get again ~130W or more if I fire up a browser and with no javascript no youtube no big pages. This thing reaches ~150W playing a video even using some kind of GPU accel.

However, this energy consumption is still unacceptable because usually I work more than 10-11 hours per day and consequently I'm consuming more or less ~1.5 kW per day.

Some years ago, I made a bet with my work colleages that I would be able to use a very small computer for regular work. The challenge was to use the latest model of the Raspberry Pi -which was 3B at the time- for a whole season and only for work purpose. The experiment would also serves to me to strengthen my habits of working without touching a web browser or use "huge graphical apps" such as Visual Studio Code. That experiment worked very well and I won the bet by the way.

So today I have considered make another little experiment and I am going to test how is to work with a Raspberry Pi 4B again, but with my current peripherals and with some differences.

The "new" setup consists of a Raspberry Pi 4 (fanless) with an external SSD and connected to one of my MSI monitors and with a keyboard and mouse with no LEDs.

In this experiment I have managed to reduce the energy consumption to 19-20 W, with the monitor at minimum brightness and doing exactly the same tasks that I usually do, with a little more patience, worth mentioning.

I know that all this is crazy and really it is, but I'm taking into account the remarkable difference of consuming 100-120 W less per hour to do the same job and until now I have not been aware of this.

If you're wondering how I'm going to make video calls or use heavy "graphics" programs like full-featured browser, the trick is to use my mobile phone to use crapping apps such as Teams (I'm forced to) and to perform quick search queries in a browser. Everything else should be done through TUI or CLI apps if possible.

Well, on another post I want to give you more details about this experiment and I'll put here a list with all the TUI/CLI programs that I am using, but basically a X11 server with bspwm, polybar, a bunch of scripts, a terminal and good choices of modern programs.

Thank you very much for reading all of this and please my apologies for the language: I even not tried to translate the text with an automatic translator and I need to practice.

I don't have a comment system so if you want to add a comment, please contact me.

Running on Low Power was published on 📅 2022-08-06

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