@novastorm I'm a little surprised to see this, and am looking into it.

I use ConnectMeNow 24/7, running with 3 mounts that auto mount, one with "on network change" and "on server appear".

On network change should not take any resources worth mentioning as it is macOS that monitors this by default and notifies ConnectMeNow when this happens (standard API call).

On server appear however would take resources as it is polling the network at intervals (set to 10 seconds in the general Preferences window).

When your Mac is sleeping, ConnectMeNow is not active at all. It gets a notification from macOS when macOS goes sleep, takes a snapshot of mounted shares, and gets a notification when macOS wakes up again (to potentially remount unmounted shares). These are my settings:

Power consumption for ConnectMeNow, according to Activity Monitor, is 20W in 12 hrs, which includes sleep (I rarely shutdown my Mac) - I opened up my Mac about 3 hours ago.
My Mac: Macbook Pro M1 Max.

So ... I have no idea why Activity monitor would say 119W for the last 12 hours unless your network keeps changing repeatedly (eg. WiFi loss or unstable). Note that macOS will (as far as I understand) put ConnectMeNow in "pauze" mode, so it would not consume any (or very little) power.

Did some searching with Google and found that the value presented by Activity Monitor, especially with Apple Silicon CPU's, may not be all that reliable due to it's efficiency cores being (potentially) measured like regular cores (your M3 has 4 efficiency cores, my M1 Max only 2).
* Mind you I'm most certainly not an expert on this, since I "measure" power consumption by how fast my battery drains.

So the better question may be: How fast does your battery drain with and without ConnectMeNow running?

My Macbook easily runs at least a day on battery, and I have set my battery to "Optimized charging" and I see that my battery can hold a maximum of only 85% of its capacity out of the factory, with energy mode set to "High Power" for battery and charger mode.

In short: I do not know what to think of 119W ... is this a real and correct number?
In the application I do not see anything that would pull that kind of power consumption.

I'd be happy to explore this more with you to see what we can find. 😊 

Note: did some more digging and I think 119W really cannot be a correct number.

I use my browser 24/7, I do a lot of video transcoding with Handbrake and I use Lazarus (software developement) intensively.
These 3 main power users showing 122W, 168W, and 92W respectively.
And those two applications I use really a LOT, at the same time.

So 119W for ConnectMeNow really sounds like an incorrect number?

FYI: ConnectMeNow in your configuration is just sitting idle until you either click a share (to be mounted or unmounted) or macOS reports a network change (ConnectMeNow is passively waiting until macOS notifies it that something changed).

You could try and open ConnectMeNow and then open the log window (in ConnectMeNow) - you may need to keep the log window on top and not do anything in between otherwise it may log that the window was hidden and then shown again. It shows log messages in realtime.
See if anything is happening there that might give away why 119W could be correct?

Thanks for the detailed response.

For the moment, I have changed betwork polling to 60 seconds (from 10s). I will investigate in the coming days to see how the power usage is, and if it is actually (still) high.

The polling won't be used unless you use "On server address appear", so in your config this should not have an impact.
(never hurts to set it to 60 seconds of course, since your config isn't using it)

Are you seeing anything in the log window in ConnectMeNow?