I discovered a similar issue. PC desk was using 8-9W when the PC was turned OFF! My power strip was taking a bit under 1W (the little light, old), two smart bulbs as well but I'll allow those losses. An older Logitech speaker setup (2+1) was taking 6-7W, turned off! Crazy.. and illegal if it were made today (in EU). So this is completely wasted energy in my opinion.. started disconnecting the whole desk now.

For comparison, my home server is averaging 7-8W, turned on all the time:

I also learned that PC's draw a lot of power lol. I used to sit on my PC all day, now I know how much it cost. Even the monitor turning off splits the power draw by half.

Chest freezers are exceptionally energy efficient. It's not a very good comparison.

I also found out something interesting. My desktop uses about 1/3 of the power one of my freezers do. :)

Couple of thoughts:

1. That smart plug may not be rated to the max wattage when GPU and CPU are at full blast. Be careful, because that could be an expensive mistake. Place a surge protector between the smart plug and the PC to be safe. Also run the PC full tilt for a while and make sure the smart plug doesnt get warm. If it does, fores have been known to start from those.

2. Sounds like you know this with WoL, but suspend is your friend 😉 If the gaming PC is linux and you run into suspend issues, let me know, I've seen 'em all.

Those storage freezers are doing nothing the vast majority of the time. Not really a fair comparison.

My desktop PC idles quite high as well. The semi high-end consumer motherboards on the AMD side tend to use a lot of power at idle, so I think that's a big part of it (at least the x570 series, can't speak for later). And as others have said, high refresh rate and multiple monitors can make things worse.

I'll add though that people's perception of how much power there system is using can be skewed by software based monitoring tools. People may think there system is using only 50W because that's what software reports but it's actually drawing a 100W at the wall.

It has never occured to me my whole life to not suspend or shut down computers overnight. It wakes up in like 2 seconds why wouldnt you, even if it used only an extra 1W

If I'm reading that correctly, that shows the system is drawing around 100W just sitting idle.

Something is not right there.

Either the power meter is way out of calibration, or there is a configuration issue with your PC. Maybe you have a performance setting that is causing the CPU and GPU to not idle down ever? Or a rogue antivirus software that is cranking the CPU constantly?

Are there any spinning disk hard drives in your PC? They can sometimes use around 5W each on idle. That was the biggest cause of idle power consumption on my old xeon server, with 8 HDDs.

PSU choice can also affect it. Eg, if you buy into marketing and buy a monster 850W PSU, but it's idle all the time and only uses 450W under load, then the PSU is spending the whole time outside it's efficiency curve, and can end up causing more power draw than expected.

Yeah, energy monitoring ruined several things for me. Can't let my PC idle anymore, can only turn on the dishwasher when the sun is shining, need to explain regularly to my wife, why our home network and server infrastructure consume 130 Watts per hour, have to automate all plugs with standby devices connected...

The damn freezer consumes only 400 Watts per day while Network infrastructure, server, Wallpanels and KNX consume 3 Kilowatts, I wish I would have never learned this.

What kind of freezers are they? I hear that top loading freezers are quite efficient because the cool doesn't escape when it gets opened like a front loading one.

Have you considered putting your gaming pc in one of the storage freezers? /s

Yeah, man, getting into Home Assistant and messing with energy monitoring did more than thousands of chastising TV segments to get me to fully shut down my computers.

Who gives a crap about gaming use power consumption, give me idle benchmarks, you cowards. Do you even know how kWh work?

I love my old desktops that pull almost nothing.

If you want to expand from just monitoring a couple sockets to monitoring the whole house; I'd recommend Iotawatt. I've been using one of these to monitor every circuit in my house for a few years now.

You can use the built in webpages shown below to view it's internal graphs, or setup an exporter to feed the data into external DBs like influxDB+Graphana or Emoncms.

monitors

Don't underestimate the power draw of multiple monitors.

But while you're at it: simply turn off different devices on the same power strip and check what actually draws how much.