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 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.
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.
Averages 50-70 watts. Includes my main NUC NAS thing and all of my networking equipment.
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.
I can trip the measly 15 amp breaker by drawing 1.5kW on two servers + turning on an amplifier that is somehow on the same circuit despite being in a different room quite far from where my servers are lol.
On average though I only draw like 350W. The huge spike only happens if I run a miner/llm on both of my servers or the during the startup spike.
The 1kW chunk comes from some RTX Quadro 6000s which each eat 250W each when maxxed out.
EDIT: Want to mention that most machines report their power draw (from mobo) without IPMI, so you can use your favorite stats collector use it to form a rough estimate of kWh total in case you don’t have a proper meter that records usage.
My server is a OnePlus5T running Post marketOS. It runs AdGuardHime, a Static Website, nginx, and Anubis.
i3-4160 running Proxmox (OPNSense VM and a couple of containers) with 3 spinny drives and no GPU, TP-Link 8x GbE switch, ASUS AX1800 as a Wifi AP, ISP’s own manky cable modem, plus a UPS eats about 66-72 watts at the wall socket. If I install a passively cooled GT-710 for transcoding, it adds 10-15 watts at idle.
Around 300wh.
- router
- sw with 4 poe cams
- 2 minipcs as servers
- pc used as nas with truenas
Just checked my ups. Looks like I’m currently drawing 125W. That’s a NAS, 3 laptops, router, modem, AP, bookshelf pc, and switch.
About 300-400 watts. I should put it on a smart plug to track it over time. I have a NAS with 16 HDDs, an outdated super overkill switch that I should replace to save some power, and a few old laptops.
It also might use some more power while transcoding for my PeerTube Instance or Jellyfin, and I have my desktop set up as a remote runner for the PeerTube Instance, so that uses some additional power.
A lot of UPSs will have power metering as well if you’re not already on one.
I am, and it does, that’s how I got the 300-400w estimate. It is connected to the NAS and shuts it down gracefully when power goes out. Wonder if the NAS can also read the power usage over that cable. Might just be easier to use a $15 zigbee plug though to get the data directly into Home Assistant.
If you have a NUT server configured then you can depending on UPS vendor. My APC can and that’s how I pull it into HA.
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
late but i think i lose the thread. The entire house runs at slightly over 1.5kW, and self hosted equipment accounts around 1.2kW of that. The daily cost is only about £2 though due to solarand batteries.
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).
When nothing (no a/c, washer, work PCs off, etc) is running my house power draw is about 500-800w. So my battery keeps things going until the next day.
Edit: just checked and whole house is 350W this evening.
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?
