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?
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.
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!
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. 😭
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.
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.
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.
