I actually attached a Kill-a-Watt to the Linux Mint laptop I’m using with a zigbee USB receiver. It runs about 5W most of the time when idling. I love that. Adding something that may create steady CPU usage is not very appealing to me. I am trying to come up with a work-around to a flash action, such as plugging an LED light strip that is set to flashing mode into a zigbee power outlet and toggling on the outlet in the event of an alarm.
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That will draw less resources than any automation ever could (as soon as the alarm is triggered).
In that case you could use the device state change of your motion sensor as a trigger and check if the alarm is armed. I’m curious what that will do for the powerdraw compared to the other option.
It should work, but if you want to be extra-cautious with the processor load, you could increase the scene interval (example: switching to “every 10 seconds” ) and add 5 groups of blocks “Turn on - Wait - Turn off” inside the scene.
This way, you reduce the “global” frequency of scene starting.
The only downside is that if you disable the alarm, it’ll take 10 seconds to “clear” the current flash. It’s a balance to find between to small refresh rate and too high 