Home Assistant kept wasting power on my home lab, and this tiny change fixed it

A Home Assistant instance running in a Proxmox VM was causing unexpected CPU spikes and fan noise due to the built-in hassio_dns plugin entering a retry loop when its Cloudflare DNS fallback requests were refused. The fix is a single SSH command — `ha dns options --fallback=false` — which disables the CoreDNS fallback behavior and immediately resolves the high CPU usage. The post also covers general home lab power efficiency tips including VM resource limits, Proxmox CPU governor settings, and C-States.