I finally turned off the IC706MkIIG...and power saving

With the impending electricity price hikes of around 25% making the news, I decided it's time to start reducing my power consumption again. 

The killer at my QTH is my home lab rack in the garage - which is backed by a 6Kva UPS that also feeds the desk in my study - and a heap of radio gear on my desk. And being a typical IT person, I have an allergy to turning things off (PTSD from earlier years of stuff not turning back on perhaps?). 

Said rack during the day (I work from home a lot) is dragging between 800-900w. If I turn off my monitors and let my PC shutdown, I could get it down to 700w overnight. This adds up. 

I decided to drag in the barely used RTL-SDR from the back shed and hook it up to the Intel NUC that the Icom is connected to... and to the same antenna, then set it up to receive SSTV - pretty much the only reason I leave that machine on. That machine has a pretty low power drawer.

Then, I turned off the Icom's power supply which includes the digital noise filter (Xiegu GNR1) and the tuner (mAT-180H) overnight. My overnight power consumption dropped another 50w.   Our solar setup provides around 1/3 of our entire power, but still, this will save around $70 per year by itself based on the pre-hiked rates.

I've been lazy with that, but it's time to start trying to reign in the power consumption. 

I have a few additional changes coming up:
- I've replaced my server with a newer model. Sadly it does chew a little more power but it has some potential savings elsewhere.

- I'm likely to fill the drive arrays in it full of larger ewasted SSDs. This will allow me to turn off a heap of spindle disks that cost significantly more to run. I'm expecting to drop perhaps 100w doing this. 

- I want to virtualise my PC. It's something I've already done for the most part with another machine to reduce our power usage. It drives our security camera display, and it has a dedicated graphics card (which is also used for media encoding). I'm likely to add another one. My PC sleeping has always been a painful one for me. As a person who does a lot of work on things that require uninterrupted terminal connections - my PC sleeping and disconnecting can be fairly frustrating. Adding another video card to the server might bring the server power up another 30w, but the PC going off will save another 70w. 

Other recent attempts to reduce power consumption:

- Reduced the light cycles on our aquariums. 

- Reduced the temperature on our reef aquarium from 25C to 24C.  It has a 300w heater so the less work it does the better. The tank's idle consumption is 135w. It can peak at 500w during the day with the lights and heater on. I can't drop the heat further. I could probably wind down the other components to run a little slower and potentially drop a couple of watts out of it. 

- I cleaned out the rack. It had a lot of crap in there, and I've pulled it out. This also helps airflow and disconnected some bits that were simply drawing power for no useful reason. 

- I disconnected the redundant power supply for the server. Some risk involved absolutely, but it absolutely registers on the power meter when its on. 

A good chunk of the home lab power is tax deductible given I do a lot of work related stuff on it, but still, one has to pay for that in the mean time, and our power bills are already horrendous. 

- Water feature outside is now on a smart timer, and is configured to only run during daylight. If I ever get around to writing a better chunk of code for it, it'll only run when it's not windy and daylight.  

- Doing the power hungry stuff during the day. Especially when solar generation is up. This one takes a bit of planning. The dishwasher tends to get started during the day - often around 9-10am when our solar generation gets up over our base draw (typically around 1.8 kW by then). Our washing is done almost entirely with a dryer, and with 2 kids - one of whom manages to wear half of her wardrobe in a given week, washing day is just that. An entire day. Often into the evening. Peak power is around 10c kW/hr more expensive and starts at 3pm. The goal is to be finished by then. Our entirely east oriented panels become effectively useless around 3pm too, so once that time hits we need to have that wrapped up. 

- Smart lighting. A lot of the lights in our house are on smart switches. I have those integrated into "Home Assistant" where I have dashboards setup. A panel on that dashboard allows me to see the status of every connected light in the house.. and some of the 12v lights coming from the back shed's batteries. Very useful during family time in the lounge room when a quick look determines that everyone's left the bedroom lights on. Also handy when I am in at the office, and I know the XYL has just left for work, and I know damned well that she's left the house leaving the bedroom, bathroom and wardrobe lights on. I can also see and control the bathroom heater from the same interface... for much the same reasons - but then I set a maximum temperature on it and took away any "in bathroom" controls beyond turning a smart switch into a power button for it. 

- Reduced monitor brightness. This really doesn't save a lot, but it can knock a few watts out. And to be honest, on decent monitors, you barely notice it. Our security camera monitor was dropped to around 50%. Most of the time, the room it's in (my study) is dark, so it's negligible. My own monitors have been dropped almost as much. 

- I thought the power consumption on our gas ducted heater might be an interesting thing to look into, especially given its winter here. Looking back over the last week, it's consumed 2kW hours on the worst day. On the warmest it was half that. It might be contributing $10 a month to the power bill. Our house is rarely cold. The gas bill will suck, but at least it's warm. I'll accept that. 

- I did consider how I could try to virtualise the Intel NUC that connects the Icom and RTL-SDR, but VMware doesn't support passthrough of audio interfaces which makes it problematic. I could potentially make that work with the SDR and V-cable, which would then mean that I could push that audio out via the remote desktop to hear it. Maybe. Getting the NUC to wake up remotely when I want to fire it up might be a little more challenging. Wake On LAN might work. Or it might not. 

EDIT: It turns out that configuring Wake On LAN to work via Remote Desktop was simple for me. I use Remmina Remote Desktop Client for RDP and in its advanced configuration, I can set a "before connection" command. In this case, I installed "etherwake" and simply told it to execute that along with the NUCs MAC address. The SDR absolutely hates the disconnections and needs to be restarted, so off to virtualise that one.

Future:

- Smart timer for the XYL's electric blanket. She rarely turns it off much to my absolute disgust. Her varying roster makes it difficult to be strict on timing, but I'd like to start by capturing some meaningful data to show her how much it costs being left on. I suspect we could benefit by running a default program to enable it early evening and turn it off at 7am. If she's had a night shift, she'll be home and in a warm bed and asleep by the time the house starts to warm up anyway. I also run a manual schedule on those nights to turn on the front light just before she's due home. It wouldn't be hard to write a routine that I could execute that puts the blanket on 2 hours before she's due home, and turns the lights on at the end of the shift.