Power Usage

Power Usage is a FreePBX 17 report module that shows how much electricity the machine running your AI Agent's local speech and language models is drawing, where that power is going, and what it costs under your electricity tariff.

It is an add-on for the AI Agent module and does not work on its own. The readings are taken every second on the services host by the AI Agent control daemon, which also keeps the history. Power Usage is the page in FreePBX that reads, charts and prices them.

• Live and historicalA live chart of the last five minutes updated every second, and history from 1 hour to 1 year or any custom period.
• Per GPU, CPU and whole PCEach NVIDIA GPU is measured. CPU and whole-PC figures are estimates unless the CPU's energy counters can be read.
• Top appsWhich programs, services, Docker containers and Ollama models the power is going to, split by CPU and GPU.
• Tiered tariff costPrice levels per kWh with a fine when a level is reached, the billing cycle so far and a projection to its end.

What the page shows

One report page under Reports in the FreePBX menu.

Current readings and live chart

Current draw for each GPU, the CPUs and the whole PC, with each GPU's draw against its power limit. Readings can be averaged over 1 second to 5 minutes.

History

Preset ranges of 1 h, 6 h, 24 h, 7, 30 and 90 days and 1 year, custom from/to dates, earlier and later buttons, and drag across the chart to zoom in.

Statistics

For each device: current, average, lowest and peak draw, when the peak happened, energy used, its share of the total and, once a tariff is set, its cost.

Daily consumption

Stacked bars and a table of energy per day for 7 days to a year, split by CPU, each GPU and the rest of the PC. Click a day to open it in History.

Top apps

Right now or over the selected range. Each app is charged for its share of CPU time and GPU load. Idle and overhead get their own row, so the rows add up to the whole PC.

Billing cycle and tariff

Set the currency, the billing day, any number of price levels and the fine for each level, plus the rest of the premises' usage, so the PC is priced at the level it actually pushes the bill into.

Measured and estimated figures

What the numbers are based on.

• GPUs are measured, one series per NVIDIA card, read with nvidia-smi on the services host.
• CPU power is an estimate worked out from load and the CPU's published power rating, unless the CPU's RAPL energy counters can be read. The kernel keeps these counters readable by root only by default. A setup script in the AI Agent module opens them to the daemon's user group. CPU and memory power are then measured.
• Whole-PC power is always an estimate. There is no wall meter. It is calculated as CPU, GPUs and memory plus an allowance for the board, fans and drives, divided by the power supply's efficiency. Both values can be adjusted on the services host.
• History is kept for about 400 days on the services host. It keeps building up while FreePBX is down or being upgraded. Minutes when the daemon was not running count as nothing and are not filled in with guesses.

Requirements

• FreePBX 17.
• The AI Agent module, version 1.53.0 or later, installed on the same FreePBX. It is a hard dependency: Power Usage will not install without it.
• The AI Agent control daemon (voice-agent-control, a current version with power history) running on the Linux host that runs your local speech services. FreePBX must be able to reach that host on port 2705.
• NVIDIA GPUs with the NVIDIA driver for GPU readings. Without them, only the CPU and whole-PC estimates are shown.