I’ll just come out and say it: 50W. I know, I know an order of magnitude above what’s actually needed to host websites, media center and image gallery.
But it is a computer I had on-hand and which would be turned on a quarter of the day anyway. And these 50W also warm my home, although this is less efficient than the heat pump, of course.
What’s your usage? What do you host?
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Mine is roughly 300 watts, much of which is from using an old computer as a NAS separate from my server server.
However, I put the whole thing in the basement next to my heat pump water heater which sucks the heat out of the air and puts it into my water, so I am ameliorating the expense by at least recapturing some of the *waste heat.
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370W average.
3 x Lenovo x3650 M5 (Proxmox Nodes)
- 1 x Xeon E5-2697A v4
- 128GB DDR4 ECC
- 2 x 960GB sATA SSD
- 3 x 900GB SAS3 10K RPM HDD
- 1 x nVidia Quadro M2000
TP Link TL-SG3428X switch
Raspberry Pi 3B+ (physical Pi-hole server)
Generic Mini PC Intel N3150 (OpenVPN client)
Dell Optiplex (OPNSense firewall)
- Intel i5 4590
- 8GB
Is that 370watt across all of them or per fat server? I ask because three m5 sound like a lot of power drain!.
And thanks for sharing!
That’s for everything listed above. This is measured straight from my UPS which everything is connected to.
AMD Ryzen 5600G
B550 Aorus Master
2x16 Ripjaw V 3200mhz
1x 14 TB Toshiba N300 for media
1x 6TB Seagate Ironwolf for backup important data
1x 500GB Samsung evo 970 as systemdrive
1x 500GB Crucial P1 as cache and download
1x 2TB Crucial P3 for docker, apps, databases, incus
Bequiet 400W
Nvidia GTX 1660 Super
Idle power 53w, totally worth it ☺️ The extra graphic card is for Immich and Ollama / overall transcoding.
I currently have probably 10% of your performance at 2x the power draw. 😭
😳😳😳
Get new hardware or you will pay it with your energy bill
Lol, I’ve been paying for years! (It’s been about $1/day).
I’m working on it. Have a new NAS box I’m currently setting up - it’s max output power is 180w, I should know later today what my idle power is like.
And then… I get to restructure all our data stores, backup processes, etc. Oh fun.
~600W. 2 machines: Dell 730 8 disks running multiple Minecraft servers. Supermicro 16 disks in raid 10 running multiple VM for various functions. All on a 6kva ups (overkill I know)
Luckily I have a large solar array.
My R710 is begging to be replaced.
Ok, so most of you also use normal PC processors for your setups. So my power usage is not that high in comparison.
But still, a RaspberryPI would use much less and would still be performant enough.
As soon as you have a requirement for large reliable storage then you’re on to at least the small desktop arena with a few HDD at which point it’s more efficient to just have the small pc and ditch the RPI.
5W vs 50W is an annual difference of 400 kWh. Or 150 kG CO2e, if that’s your metric. Either way, it’s not a huge cost for most people capable of running a 24/7 home lab.
If you start thinking about the costs - either cash or ghg - of creating an RPi or other dedicated low power server; the energy to run HDDs, at 5-10W each, or other accessories, well, the picture gets pretty complicated. Power is one aspect, and it’s really easy to measure objectively, but that also makes it easy to fetishize.
At $0.13/kwh 100 watts 24/7/365 will cost you $113.88 a year, or roughly $10 a month. Little things add up.
$10/month is one drink in the pub on one Friday night out of four. It’s not even a movie ticket.
European electricity rates are closer to $0.30, and I agree that 100W 24/7 is a cost worth being aware of. I think we’re seeing in this thread that it’s pretty easy to find a system with standard PC parts from the past decade that idles in the 50W range, like OP, even with a couple of HDDs, and $50/year (US), even $150/year (EU), electricity cost to keep an old desktop out of a landfill maybe doesn’t seem so bad.
I mean, one should think hard whether their home lab really needs a second full system running for failover, or whether they really need a separate desktop-based system just for NAS. And maybe don’t convert your old gaming rig and its GPU to a home server. Or the quad-Xeon server that work is ‘just giving away,’ even if it would be cool to have a $50,000 computer running in the basement.
Good timing for this thread. I just finished consolidating 2 computers worth of fun into 1 newer computer that can do it all. I sold my wife on the idea with electricity as the reasoning.
In the end, it uses 30 watts less, which is not as much as I had hoped. That’s about $5 a month.
180 watts with an i5-13400, 9 spinning disks, 1 M.2 SSD, no extra GPU, 24 port switch (powers 3 AP’s), modem, Mikrotik router, and a large UPS. I wonder if the UPS uses any power as a trickle charge for the batteries.
What are your electricity prices that 30w costs €5/m
30w x 24 hr./day *30 days/mo. = 21.6 kWh. I pay about $.25/kWh, so $5.40.
Spain would probably be around that much if my calculations are correct.
50 watts is maybe halfof one of my 10 gig switches…
Damn, your switches are using that much? I have a MikroTik CRS518 and it’s using like 40 Watts on idle (transceivers not included)
yah, my house is wired with copper and 10 gig copper uses a lot of power. It doesn’t really help that the new slightly less power hungry 48 port 10 gig switches are thousands of dollars. I’m using 100 to 150ish watts per 10 gig switch to be able to buy the switch for under 500 bucks instead of using 60-100 watts and paying 2-5k per switch…
Damn son, what’re you runnung?
dell powerconnect 8164’s and arista 7050tx’s . House is wired with copper so 10 gig copper is what I have to use and that’s power hungry.
Mine is around 10W average.
It runs:
- Websites
- my blog
- Jellyfin
- Home assistant
- Nextcloud
And a few other things.
Probably about a kilowatt.
My current setup uses ~180W, which is a lot, but WAY better than my previous one, which was ~600W. Power is cheap where I live, so I’m not too worried about it.
180W homelab:
- N6005 fanless mini PC running pfsense
- mikrotik CRS310-8G+2S+IN switch
- TP-Link AP225 access point
- Server running proxmox w/ AMD 5900X, RTX 3080, 128GB ECC RAM, LSI-9208i w/2x10TB drives, and dual SFP+ NIC
600W homelab:
- Aruba 24-port PoE gigabit switch w/ 4xSFP+ ports
- Dell R720xd fully kitted out w/ 12x 6TB drives, 2x 512GB SSD, 2x 32GB SD cards, 100-something GB RAM, 2x whatever the best CPU was for that unit
- Dell R710 w/ 6x 6TB drives, 1x 256GB SSD, 100-something GB RAM, 2x whatever the best CPU was for that unit.
- TP-Link AP225 access point
~53 W
-
Server:
- AMD Ryzen 5 5600G
- 4x16 GB DDR4 3200 Mhz
- 256 GB NVMe as boot-disk
- 2x256 GB Samsung SSDs for VMs
- 2x2 TB WD Red Plus HDDs
-
Mini PC: Beelink S12 N95
- 16 GB DDR4
- 256 GB NVMe
-
8 port unmanaged TP Link switch
I would like to expand my storage, however I don’t have any available SATA ports and I believe adding an HBA would increase the idle draw about 8 W. I might just upgrade the SSDs and split the storage between the HDDs and SSDs.
-
About 500W. 1 self build server 1 Dell R510 and one dell R710. This also includes a bit of network gear like a 48 port switch.
1.21 giggawats
What do you get when you cross Family guy with BTTF?
1.21 giggetywatts!
6w or so in idle, 50w under load with HDDs and RPi combined
Depends where you draw the line of the home lab. I’m drawing 160W at the moment, but that includes a dedicated CCTV PC (running Proxmox in a cluster) and POE switch. The CCTV I don’t consider part of the home lab really, the alternative would be an off the shelf box and no one would consider that.
The 160W also includes a 24 port switch (I’m only using 8) and the FTTP power, plus the rake from the UPS. So probably total the actual homelab server would be about 80-100, I guess. But even then it runs my router using opnsense, so I don’t have a separate router box to power. It also serves as my “cloud” storage, so I’m not saving watts, but I’m saving the cost there.
I could get the power down quite a bit by changing the 6 HDD for 2 mirrored HDD, but the cost of large enough disks means it’d be years before it paid for itself, so I’m sticking with 6 small disks for now.
I’ve thought about trimming things down and going lower powered, but it all comes back to storage and needing the large storage online all the time.
Plus I consider a 100W a big saving when before I ran a dual Xeon Dell R710 which used around 225W under the same workload.
