In the name of sustainablity, I bought a power meter

It's probably not difficult to guess that I own several computers. It's a part of my job and there's no real way around it. Remember, the cloud is just someone else's computer. Today as I'm walking through a local mall, I saw an extension cord with a power meter on it. You know what, that's a good idea. I've been thinking about adding some solar to my apartment to at least partially offset my power consumption. It'll be quite helpful to know how much power I'm using. Maybe I'll learn something. I bought it and hooked my PC and work laptop onto it - the 2 major power consumers in my apartment.

And I did learn something. I thought monitors are practically free, like pulling 20W. But no, my Asus VG27A pulls 45W constantly. While my PC sits at ~90W doing lite tasks - vscode and a few FireFox tabs. And, more importantly, my work laptop pulls 30W sitting in sleep mode. What? I'll always unplug it when I'm not using it from now on.

I think what I learned even more besides the actual power consumption is intentional living. I've known about the concept for a while but never got it. Today I've found unexpected power usage where I already put the most effort into. The feeling of being in control of my life is quite empowering. Solar will come sometime later, that's a project needing lots of planning and money. And I've other things that'll be more impactful to work on.