Power Consumption

As part of hardware testing and usage, it's important to keep an eye on the power consumption of devices. Since a major cost doesn't originate from buying the hardware but from running it.

With the Shivering-Isles Infrastructure the devices run in a regular flat without additional, external cooling, therefore it's enough to measure the power consumption of the device itself.

Measuring power consumption

A Shelly Plug S measures the power consumption. It reports measurements down to 1W accuracy over time. The time of measurement is usually a long time frame, such as 7 days, to collect realistic numbers under regular use.

The goal is to collect realistic data for the actual use-case and not some benchmark results that either collect minimums or maximums.

After the measurement removing the Shelly Plug eliminates the additional power consumption and an unneeded factor for failure.

Monitoring power consumption

If the device runs on the UPS, the UPS itself reports a load statistic which allows the calculation of the power consumption of all battery buffered devices. The way Prometheus monitors the overall use of power for all devices attached to the UPS.

In the Shivering-Isles Infrastructure this is used to keep the overall power consumption in check and spot anomalies on regular reviews of the relevant dashboard.

For the UPS integration itself, nut-exporter is used.