Selfhosters what is the power draw of your entire setup? And have you done anything special to manage it you’d like to share?
Including all network equipment I use around 110kWh of good ol’ 120V 60Hz USA juice per month. Averaging about 215 watts of power draw for my systems. Nothing amazing, but I like to think that it’s a conservative setup for everything I accomplish with it. I’m paying around $25 a month for my setup. None of that includes my work PC or personal PC, just hosting infrastructure.
Other than trying to make sure all power states are available on my server I haven’t done a lot of power conservation.
I’m curious what you all have.
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I’m designing around an Intel N150, and this thread is the reason. These chips idle in single digits with an SSD, so most of the cost of running always-on goes away. The catch is the 16GB RAM ceiling on most boards, which caps how much local AI you can run on it. For the low-watt folks: what did you give up to get there, and was it worth it?
I can’t believe I’m the lowest power draw at 50w. I thought that was pretty high.
That includes all my network hardware, my NAS, and my server. Basically everything that is “always on”
All these people saying 500, 600, 700+ watts - it’s almost hard to believe. My “gaming” computer, with two monitors, peaks around 400W on graphics-heavy games, and the monitors are like 120 of that. I suppose, though, if you’re running a server-class CPU, a half dozen HDDs, and a GPU for continuous transcoding or mining, the it wouldn’t be too hard to get there.
I run a dozen containers on an N100 with a couple of HDDs, VOIP device, router & cable modem on 63W, and I’ve considered that a pretty fair deal for a home lab. Of course, that only serves the household - nothing really offered to the public.
My rack server uses 150W idle. Granted that’s 2 processors and 48 cores, 256GB ram, and 8 case fans that you can’t cycle less than 35% even though they don’t need to be anywhere near that high.
I mean, my phone charges at 60W. Granted, it’s not charging 24/7 but 50W is pretty good indeed.
NAS sits at 24w idle. Security cams are drawing 19w of poe power, but I suspect there is a bit more being used in total. I have another NUC using probably around 24w max.
I’ll slap some power meters on the switches and main nuc and try get some more accurate numbers.
7 or 8w idle for the server. Comes to about 10eur per year. I couldn’t justify using more without feeling like a hypocrite who also advocates for energy conservation.
Nice
What hardware are you running?
11th gen i3 NUC, headless Debian.
My NAS/home server takes about 180 kWH/year, or 20W on average (costs me about 5 Euro/month). This feels like a lot to me and makes up a good chunk of my total energy usage.
What I did to optimize it is mostly select a “low-power” x86 platform, and limit the number of disks. I also decided not to use TrueNAS because it couldn’t let the disks from going to sleep.
The machine hosts 10 TB of usable storage (+RAID 1), syncthing, immich, file server, Influx DB, Grafana, and a few other services.
Yeah I use Unraid for multiple reasons but being able to spin down disks when not in use was a big factor. I have 6 mechanical drives totalling 56TB of usuable storage so it was important to me they don’t all need to be on at the same time. TrueNAS also comes with some other headaches, I like being able to drop in whatever disk I need to for expansion or replacement.
I like being able to drop in whatever disk I need to for expansion or replacement.
I didn’t move that far away (to Debian + ZFS), so that limitation still remains. Although the addition of Raid-Z expansion should alleviate things quite a bit.
That’s the one thing I don’t like about Truenas. It technically can spin down disks, but there’s no way to force them. You can set the idle timer to 5 minutes, but then it constantly spins them back up again. Now I just power the entire system down with home assistant outside of the usage hours and I can power it up again with home assistant using wake on Lan.
A bit goofy, but it works for me
I think for me spin-down was working initially. But then I added some Docker containers and those could only be run on the HDDs, blocking spin down. With Debian I just put the containers on the smaller SSD, allowing the HDDs to spin down.
I’m drawing 4.474kWh per day on average, and drew 139 kWh over the last month.
I have EcoFlow batteries on both A and B PDUs.
Stuff that can be powered off (mining, redundant power supplies) gets the wall outlet feeding ups b and pdu B turned off at 4pm and turned back on at 9pm to align with my time of use rate plan.
So, averaging about 193W last month, that seems alright. What kind of hardware are you running?
Rack mount synology bad, tplink Omada switch, wireless access point, rack fans, and a rack mount nutanix server repurposed as proxmox, but it’s only drawing on the IPMI as I’ve powered it down and moved any services over to containers on the NAS.
My server is a OnePlus5T running Post marketOS. It runs AdGuardHime, a Static Website, nginx, and Anubis.
homelab running linux mint with about 60 docker containers about 45w, meassured at the socket (2HDD)
Around 1000-1200 watt continuously. Still our electricity cost is less then 0.
Anyway my old 11gen dell power edge servers cause the biggest power draw. But I am not ready to upgrade them due to the current memory shortage.
Mine draws around 15-20 watts. I’m mostly using low-power hardware: a Rock 5b as my main server, a 2tb nvme ssd, a 2tb hdd and a Glinet travel router (fine since i live in an apartment).
90w here, so 65kwh/mo. Tinyminimicro server. Three pi (5, 4, 3B), fiber gateway, Mikrotik router, switch and two APs. Plus power gear (managed PDU and UPS).
My nas takes about 40 Wh. And my network machine (proxmox + openwrt) about 20 Wh. When I upgraded my nas a year ago it was actually drawing twice as much, I have since then switched to more efficient processor (amd from normal to E) and I took out graphic card that I didn’t use. I could have in theory merge those two, but I wanted to separate networking from nas+apps. I don’t know how much my smart devices take but I don’t have many so it can be up to 50 Wh total maybe. But that is more smart home than self hosting 😀
Is this daily, monthly? Cause otherwise you’d be drawing 144kw from just a nas which is… beyond silly
Its per hour. Basically my nas draws on average 40 W at any given moment. And it’s nas but also run apps.
Used to be 200watts bang on but the latest round of updates bumped it up to 210Watts. Everything is on a UPS and I pull measurements from that into an RRD DB (because I like to make my own stuff). It’s kinda cool to see how heavy disk use or CPU intense tasks will increase power draw by up to 50W, or some times or when the power drops off sharply I know my NVR container is not working because 6 ffmpeg tasks all stopped at the same time.
- 1x T330 with 4 disks and 2 dozen services.
- 1x H340 NAS with 2 disks
- 1x PoE switch
- 3x PoE cameras
- 2x Desktop switches
- 1x Desktop router
- 1x Cable Modem
RRD
That’s a name I haven’t heard in a minute!
I see the rrdtool gallery is still up and my graph is still in there 🤭. (No it’s not the Christmas graph, that one’s insane.)
I’m using Influx nowadays but maybe I should revisit good old rrdtool for old times’ sake.
It seemed like the easiest way to store multiple years of data in a format that wouldn’t change or disappear.
I found it super easy to work with as a never-went-to-school programmer (in the rime before claude).
Most of my stuff lives on a cheap hetzner vps so that power is someone else’s problem lol. at home it’s a raspberry pi that’s always on (a few watts) and a bitaxe miner doing about 19W, that’s around 14 kWh a month, like 3 euros here. the gaming pc is the only hungry thing and it stays off, the pi wakes it with wake-on-lan when I actually need it. took me a while to get the bios settings right (erp off, power on by pci-e) but it was worth it.
is mining worth it for you?
money wise no, not even close. it’s a bitaxe gamma doing around 1 TH/s solo, so it’s basically a lottery ticket, the odds of hitting a block are tiny. it costs me like 3 euros a month in power so I treat it as a toy, I like checking the best difficulty it found and it’s a nice way to learn how mining works
On average it’s about 4kwh per day. I’m effectively off grid most of the time so the cost of electricity is irrelevant unless I go way overboard during a week of rain or something and I have to draw from the grid.
I am about to move from an 18ru rack to 45… So… Might be some expansion in the future.