Just found out my electricity bill is going up by 19% and its already stupidly high as it is. So I decided to save my own pocket to go green in what way I can. So #1 of course I’ve got my home vSphere cluster properly configured to keep off one of my servers switched off most of the time using DPM. However I want to save more energy so I had an idea about my desktop PC. Like most IT geeks I leave my home desktop PC switched on 24/7  for convenience, to have access whatever the reason I like to have it on.  I started to  think is there a way I can control my desktop PC like DPM and came up with this idea: I would schedule a task to place my PC into sleep mode at 2am and then schedule a Wake Up Lan task to power it on in its previous state at 7am thus saving me 5 hours of electricity. So this is how I did it:

Step1 I used the windows scheduler to schedule this command at 2am:

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This places my PC in a sleep state.

 Step 2. I run the DD-WRT firmware on my home router (DD-WRT is configurable on tons of routers) and one of the things it can do is schedule through a cron job a wake up lan call (WOL) . Below is the command I used to wake up using my PC from its MAC address at 7:03am:

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Job done..