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Lemmings, what's your self hosted server power usage? (programming.dev)

submitted 10 months ago by [email protected] to c/selfhosted

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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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[–] tburkhol 6 points 10 months ago (1 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 10 months ago (1 children)

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.

[–] tburkhol 3 points 10 months ago

$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.