Homelab

That is an insane power bill even after your cuts. Do you have the option of solar? With your power usage you should pay it off super fast when your bills drop to near zero?

i am paying about 20 usd for that rating for 3 months prices are crazy in us

Nice work.

Jealous of your 0.1315 😂

That's impressive.

I'm crying in .35p/kwh ($0.43)

I'm confused. How much was your idle draw before in total?

Nice work! Studies have shown many times that visibility into ones energy usage is the most helpful tool in reducing energy usage. You can't adjust effectively if you have to wait a month to see the results, being able to monitor energy live lets you make realtime tweaks to see what works.

My homelab has been running at about 90W for a long time, but had gotten up to 150W after adding an HPE ML30 and a new switch. I'm now about to retire one host (should have an Optiplex 3060 Micro for sale soon...), combining two POE switches, and hoping to get back down to at least 100W.

It's crazy how cheap power is some places. Paying upwards of $0.42 USD a Kwh here in Southern California.

Can you give more info on your energy monitor device? How does that work and what is it called?

Don't turn off the smart switch! Power cycle when you want the machine to boot. Killing all power will drain your CMOS battery faster because there is no standby power. Last thing you want is finding out your backups failed or drives got corrupted because it was no longer booting to the OS and getting a hard shutdown repeatedly.

What's that HPE switch model?

I'm running a Cisco 2960X atm and an Aruba 2930F JL258A currently.

I also have 2 Cisco WS-C3560CX-8PC-S and 3 C1000-8FP-2G-S switches I can swap things out for.

Waiting for "winter" to get here in the south so I can run some ethernet cable through the attic to a few places and finally mount my network rack on the wall.

This should be a pinned post for Homelab for others who are looking to pickup Enterprise servers for home use.

People do not realize the power consumption, cooling requirements and the noise levels enterprise servers take to run.

Damn I feel spoiled I pay 12.4384¢ per kWh where I live.

Edit: Actually I just check apparently it went up to 14.69¢ per kWh 😂

Cries in PG&E Time of Use pricing at $0.32 (winter low) to $0.54 (summer high) per KWh

$.08+ /kwh USD here, and I still opted for the lowest powered 24x7 network gear feasible. Once I calculated cost/watt/year, the economics of doing lower power became real even for lower costs like mine.

Good choices, OP!!!

I’d love to still be paying $0.13/kWh. I’m hovering around $0.20 now. My community solar farm offsets this a bit, but it’s still up a ton.

bought an used hp proliant dl380 gen9 with 128GB ECC RAM and 2xE-5 2650v3 xeon 2x500W power supplies... just to test installed ubuntu got powertop, set acpi devices to autotune, modded the ilo for fan adjustment and i am at 55W in idle.

before i have had a self made ryzen "server" with Ryzen 3700x 32GB RAM and a Nvidia GTX 1080 sitting at 130W Idle....

thats what i have to say for industrial servers ;-)

Why not virutalize pfsense and that torrent box? An extra 2 computers unplugged.

Thank you for saving Earth

How can I save on electricity?

There's always a trade off between performance and saving electricity. You cannot have both

One of the best things I did for my homelab is swap from 2 120w Xeon servers to a single Intel 12400 machine. Went from $4-5 of power a day to $1-$1.50.

I cant believe paying that much money for electric bill. I use a laptop with broken screen and keyboard for Proxmox even tho I have a poweredge r210ii. Power consumption is around 7 watts with one usb external drive to the laptop. Only have 2 VMs on proxmox.

I get the impression you spent 2,5k to do this, how much'd this cost?

Serious question.

Why didn't you bring the hot water heater down to 120?

Usually the mixing valve is required to be at 120 or below, so keeping the tank hotter won't be noticed

Lol that same bill would slap me with a 1.3kEuro/A bill lol at 40ct/kwh

I am paying the same 270 for my 60W lab.

Great talking points tho. Power is always somethign to considder whenever I see someone getting a big enterprise server.

I have been on a similar quest. I've gone from 500w to 50w over the last few years, starting with 2 r710s pimped out to the max, to a flash only white box athlon build. Slightly miss idrac, but a decent trade for it being 50w and so quiet I can only tell it's on by the LEDs.

This is why I disable turbo boost on all my Intel machines that don’t actually NEED single core performance.

My most used laptop is a 2019 16” i9 MacBook Pro that gets loud and hot as hell on the default power plan but simply limiting the CPU to 99% makes it whisper quiet, cool and it can run on an 18w iPad power brick with the as long as the brightness isn’t maxed out and I’m not stressing the Radeon 5500M GPU.

Same with my 10w micro Optiplex AD/MSSQL server; the old 4th gen i5 runs Windows server 2022 plenty fast and boot times are insanely quick. Sure, if it had a production database serving thousands of clients at a time then it would definitely crumble but I don’t need more power for a local AD/dev-staging db.

What I did, which probably applies to almost nobody: Downgraded my home servers to a single Beelink Mini PC; still gets the job done, though it is slower. Offloaded a bunch of stuff, including backups and video stuff, to my much more powerful work server and NAS. My work has a lease with electricity included. (It's my business, so I'm not doing anything fishy.) Old hardware is sitting unused. The one downside to this is that my older setup was using ~20% CPU all the time, whereas the new one uses like ~60% and goes to 100% at peaks. I don't notice it in practice.

Also, I added solar panels to my house. So even if I were paying for my older setup, it would've been covered.

What route did you go for energy monitoring?

All these changes were in the name of almost reducing up to $250 a month on the electric bill.

How long till you see a return on this investment?

3 years? 6 years? 20 years? Yea that is the essence of door-to-door solar panel install scams.

What region of the world?

This is the way. As cool as enterprise servers are it’s nice to have a setup where my servers are 1/10th the size, and power consumption, as well as have more compute.

Jeez you guys are paying so much for power! I pay $0.10 kwh so power costs for me is of no concern. I just let my servers sip away.

I just built an off grid solar array. But I’m already utilizing mostly low power/ consumer equipment. Reducing the number of hosts would hurt uptime though.

It’s okay…. I still have 4 r910s that my deepest pleas for upgrades remain unheard to this day.

I had 2x R710 couple years back. I downgraded to a Ryzen self built system when my Price went from 26c kw/h to 32c kw/h. Now i "Downgraded" (Feels more like an upgrade) again to a Lenovo mini PC because my price went up top 40c kw/h. It sips 7w idle and up to 30w when transcoding. Those things are grad. I'm thinking of getting a couple more and running them as a hyperconverged cluster. Sad times nowadays how expensive everything is getting.

You know in Europe (Belgium) elektricity is 0.3$/kWh ? You still are one of the lucky ones I guess...