In May I wrote up Watt, the lean desktop. 3.6 watts at idle. I called that lean. But I kept chasing.
It sits near 2.4 now.
Where the watts go
The picture is the whole cost when at idle. Two blocks: the bare machine and the screen. The programs I run are that thin band.
Magnify that band and it shows the software details: Claude Code is most of it. The two suites I built to chase the battery drains, CHasm and Fe₂O₃, draw 26 milliwatts together. Less than one idle Claude session. The screen alone costs more than every program put together.
What actually drained it
Chasing watts is mostly finding unnecessary drain:
- A graphics library woke up the GPU. I didn’t ask for that.
- A chat tab, open and animating, held 2 watts on one core. With my new browser, “gaze” it throttles itself to nothing when not active on the screen.
- The disk lost interrupts and froze the whole machine. Intel’s VMD, switched off in the BIOS.
None of them my code. I built tools to capture every drain. You cannot cut what you cannot see.
Every number here comes off the battery gauge, sampled over five minutes. A single reading is noise; a watt swings minute to minute.
Still chasing
The screen is the wall now. Everything I write is noise against it. That is the sign the software side is done, and the quest turns to the panel and the radios.
Still chasing.
Link to this post: https://isene.org/2026/09/The-Watt-Quest.html
