How much power does your home lab take?

hungover_pilot@lemmy.world to Selfhosted@lemmy.world – 118 points –

Mine runs at 30watts at idle.

That powers 4 switches, 1AP, and my proxmox system (framework laptop motherboard) which runs my router and my services.

What is everyone else's usage and what does it power?

90

Why are you asking, did my wife get you to ask?

But around 300w with 24 port switch, dish shelf (3.5" disks) and server with ssd's and 2.5" disks

I feel for those in Europe, these are the current spot prices in NZ

Edit corrected image:

I pay 0.7 EUR/kWh though it's capped at 0.4 EUR/kWh at the moment. Which is why I make net half of my power myself. At some 1 EUR/Wp it pays off really quickly.

I approve of the y-axis label. But everything else is kinda missing... Like the information what's depicted on the diagram. Cost of production? Price for a end-user? pre- or after tax? which country? and why did someone paint in 5 different colors? It certainly doesn't match what i'm paying.

From New Zealand and is averaged wholesale spot prices for the 5 (main) produces here

Ah okay. Makes sense. Didn't know that. And New Zealand has cheap electricity because of big hydroelectric plants and geothermal energy? Or is that a political decision like it is subsidized by the government by taking little taxes on energy?

I try not too think about it 😬

I would guess everything together is around 800 Watts

Around 100w usually for:

  • ccr2004
  • crs309
  • old epyc 7601 server (about 60w, 8 HDDs with spindown, 5 ssds and a mcx311 10G)
  • homeassistant raspi separate from the main server
  • poe switch for phone and ap.

All connected to a UPS so measuring is easy and power usage is constant. I would prefer lower as power cost is very high but there is not really anything significant to save at the moment as the server board has no standby function and i need it most of the time.

5ish watts. Raspberry pi 4 with a 2TB SSD for backups.

Average usage for me hovers around 180-200W. I'm running the following:

  • unRAID server with a Ryzen 5 5600G proc, 3 SSD/2 HDD.
  • QNAP TS-251+
  • Proxmox server running an i5-4460, 2 SSD/1 HDD
  • UDM Base
  • Unifi 8port gig switch with 3 ports providing about 12W POE, give or take.
  • ISP provided modem

Given all it does for me, I'm ok with the tradeoff.

Between 3 switches, 4 servers, and my desktop also using one of my UPS units, I average about 850w, with peaks up to 1.1kw when my desktop is running. Luckily, electricity where I live is only 13cents/kwh.

I really don't like how people most commonly try to justify the monetary cost of their power consumption.

In my opinion the way more important metrics should be how the energy you are consuming is generated and how much carbon emissions are caused by it.

Who cares that your 2000W@230V idle are "free", if that means you are burning crude oil in your backyard to generate it..

Who cares

My wallet

I'm not saying that cost of power is entirely irrelevant.

I'm saying that "My setup consumes a lot of power, but that's fine because it doesn't cost me much" is kind of backwards. While monetary cost certainly is one of the arguments for energy efficiency, responsibly using resources and avoiding wasting energy are way more compelling ones imo. That especially applies if your energy isn't produced via renewable means.

Even if power was entirely free of monetary cost, you shouldn't waste it, don't you agree?

Mine runs a little under 18 W with one 8 port managed switch, a DSL modem, CM4-based router, a tiny Wifi AP, and an Intel Celeron J4105 based mini PC server.

Mine is ~300w @ 230v most of the day. It varies only on what is being used.

when power fails and i have to switch to generator, the servers stay about the same but I can add about 250w to that for my PC, modem(nbn) etc . (which is why i know this info!)

55W idle for 3 servers, network gear and UPS. I live in the US but electricity is still expensive and I try to keep everything efficient. My primary/most powerful server with 20TB of SSD only uses 22W idle.

Server pulls around 150W with drives spun down, over 200 with all 6 spinning. UPS with all the networking equipment, server, desktop, raspi and apple tv usually hovers around 200-400W depending whether the gaming PC is on.

My last month power consumption was 151.76kWh for the UPS or around $29/mo in electricity.

edit: server is an old Dell R710 w/ dual X5675’s, 128gb of ram, GT730 for transcoding, 6x4TB 3.5” SAS drives for the array, and a 500gb SSD for cache running Unraid.

@hungover_pilot Way more than I would like but the way I see it, it's cheaper than drinking and I learn in the process so I take it as a cost of entertainment :)

300-350W (which currently equals about 100€/month). Running two proxmox servers in a cluster + 2 routers, modem and switch

My rack currently consumes about 300W. This includes the following hardware:

  • Dell PowerEdge R730 with 128GB RAM, 1x E5-2630 v3 (the second socket is unpopulated), 5x HDD and 4x SSD
  • MikroTik CRS309-1G-8S+ (8 port 10Gbit/s switch)
  • MikroTik CRS326-24G-2S+ (24 port 1Gbit/s switch)
  • MikroTik RB5009UPr (Router)
  • Whitebox NAS with Intel Pentium Gold G5400, 16GB RAM, Adaptec RAID controller in IT mode, 19x HDD and one SSD

That's a power efficient setup, nice!

I believe I could reduce the power consumption by ~50W-60W by replacing the R730 with a modern "consumer" mainboard + CPU. But I need two power supplies (I had some issues a few months ago with my UPS) and iDRAC/IPMI is so convenient that I don't want to miss it anymore.

I'm also currently searching for something power efficient to replace the Pentium in my NAS. Reason for that are some problems with bad RAM a year ago. ECC RAM would be nice to have, so that I can be notified when a RAM stick goes bad. I currently do not know for how long the old RAM stick was bad and which files may be corrupted because of that (I do not use a checksumming file system such as ZFS or BTRFS on my NAS).

I like your setup.

My stack is R730s with MD1200 DAS. Using about 380watts.

Is your nas on Ext4?

I like your setup.

Thanks :)

Is your nas on Ext4?

Yes, all HDDs in my NAS are formatted with EXT4. I don't use RAID because there are mostly static files stored there and the drives are configured to spin down after 30 minutes of inactivity.

MD1200 DAS

How loud are those? I've heard that the Dell PowerVault DAS arrays are quite loud.

Out of curiosity, what whitebox are you using for the NAS? An old PC or something you assembled purposely for the NAS? Would love to see pics too as I'm considering going down this route.

I've purposely build that NAS around two or three years ago. It's a Gigabyte B360M D3H mainboard, Intel Pentium Gold G5400 and 16GB of the cheapest RAM I could find. An Adaptec 71605 card provides SAS/SATA connections for up to 16 drives and a Mellanox Connect-X3 connects my NAS via 10Gbit/s to my network. The case is an Inter-Tech IPC 4U-4424 . It has 24 hot swap bays. But I would not recommend it because the backplane is terrible. Four or five slots are not working. Sometimes, when I re-insert a drive, it is not detected.

Using cheap RAM bit me in the ass last year as one of the RAM sticks started to fail. I didn't notice that there is a problem with the RAM at first. Only when I observed that one of my scripts was not working I started to investigate the problem. Turns out that one of the RAM sticks failed. Re-inserting the stick did not resolve the problem so I replaced all sticks with old Crucial RAM I had laying around. Some files that I transfered to the NAS during that time period are corrupt. In the future I won't use cheap RAM anymore and I'm also currently planning to replace the mainboard and CPU with something that supportes ECC RAM so that I can be notified when on of the sticks starts to fail.

Here are some pics from building the NAS

My proxmox server runs at 60W idle, which is the main Reason why I am getting a new system soon. Old one is running a old (2011 I think) dual core celeron.

Mine has been idling around 300-400 watts. I've recently been making some changes that have it running more than usual. I'm hoping in the next week I will get it back below 300 watt idle. With the space I have and the current cost of solar panels I basically offset the entire labs electric usage with about $800 worth of solar gear. So I haven't stressed too much about electric use.

What did you get to offset the cost? I'd like to do something but idk where to start looking.

~ 5 watts when I ran everything on an old laptop

~ 40 on my new desktop server

I've got:
R720 w/ 2697v2s, 12 hdds Some Intel 2011 box w/ 2667v2s A custom AM5 server w/ 7700x, 8 hdds An old Cisco enterprise 48 port (&4 SFP+) switch It seems to hover ~800w.
I'm looking into replacing a lot of it especially the Intel server because it's used for just pfSense.

Same as you. Old AMD system with a Ryzen 2400, three hard drives and two ssds running open Media vault. The hard drives spin down after 30 minutes, as I only use them once or twice a day.

To be honest, I don't really know but it's only really costing me 5 extra dollars a month so for the additional performance and storage space, it's less expensive than renting a VPS.

30 watts average for Starlink
Estimating 15 watts for the two Deco units plus the Netgear range extender (acting as Ethernet bridge to protect from lightning.)
About 100 watts for the HTPC with three usb tuners.
Between 70 watts (black) and 380 watts (white) on the old Plasma.
All running on four AGM batteries charged by solar, falling back to mains when battery drops to 20%

Comparable to your's. My Server/NAS usually is at about 15W to provide me and family/friends with a few selfhosted services. If i use it for backup or access some old photos/dvds it may spin up another hdd or two and it may draw additional power. (Or use the cpu). The cable modem and wifi router need another 20W combined.

I think that should be around 300kW per year. A bit more than the fridge in the kitchen claims to use per its energy label.

(edit: it's always very interesting to ask where people live (and what they're paying for energy) when asking questions like this. I'm not sure but i believe 300W in Texas is like 40W in Germany ;-)

I'm a simple man with a pi4 for my docker containers, one switch, so not much compared to my PC.

Would probably get a second pi4 if I need more resources.

Im also running a pi4 with docker containers but also my nextcloud instance. Been feeling it's a bit sluggish at times so I recently ordered a cheap optiplex micro, and some upgrades for the ram, ssd and cpu. The pi4 will only be used for pi-hole now.

Currently my UPS is reporting 207 watts, that’s with a unraid server (3600 + 32GB ram + 2060 super for plex, and 6 drives), a mini pc for pf sense, a rpi 4 running pihole and vpn server, a single poe ap, a modem, and security cameras… it can spike to 250w with multiple encodes going on from family … but overall not bad… I did have a dedicated 20A switch installed for just my network closet as well

I've been eyeing a transition over to intel Nucs. At the moment i'm at about 120w, hoping to bring that down to 70-80w, or even more if possible

Currently powering:

  • Thin client (firewall/router)
  • Old machine (DVR)
  • New machine (hypervisor)
  • Nuc (testing workloads)
  • Network switch
  • PoE CCTV

My rack looks to pull about 325-350W. I need to downgrade my main server, as it's a bit overkill as a decommed proliant. Need to figure out a high ram nuc as a replacement

About 150 watts:

  • Qotum i3 4 port mini pc pfSense firewall
  • TP-Link 24 port managed switch
  • Shuttle DH110 SFF PC running Proxmox with Coral TPU running a Home Assistant OS VM with the Coral passed through for Frigate and an Ubuntu VM running Jellyfin, *arr stack and other media stuff
  • Lenovo m910q running Proxmox and a bunch of VMs for docker and testing stuff (RHEL, Debian 11, Windows 10 Enterprise N)
  • HP ProDesk 400 SFF running Proxmox with a Debian 11 VM that is my "daily driver" OS
  • An ancient AMD FrankenPC cobbled together from old parts that runs Ubuntu 20.04 baremetal and exists only to house a few IronWolf drives totalling about 24TB.

All of the systems except for the firewall and fileserver have i7-6700T CPUs - 4 cores, 8 threads, 35 watts. Nice chips!

Asrock X300 Mini with 2x HDD 2 TB 2,5" drives in Raid1, NVMe Samsung, 1 TB 2,5" HDD connected via USB and Zigbee gateway

100W or so.

  • ISP Fiber ONT
  • Opnsense box (Optiplex SFF, i5-4570)
  • 24 port switch
  • Server (HP MT, i5-7500) with 2x SSD, 2x SAS HDD
  • Server (Moderro IEC-4660, i3-7100u) with SSD, 2x USB HDD for backups

What's the recommended way to measure power consumption? Any instrument in particular?

25w pc with 3 SSDs and idk how much w for rpi running 2nd pihole

I think I'm at 225 watts.

HP ProLiant us using 125 to 150 mostly, synology nas that consumes about 30, and I think the ubiquity stuff takes about 75 watts

About 1200w @120v

I have 200 of that at home, the other 1000 is in our data center at work, and I don’t pay for that power. It’ll be rough when I leave some day.

My homelab gives me power!!!

Oh, you're talking about electricity 😁 about 70 Watts: (60W Proxmox server (OMV, Node Red, Domoticz, Home Assistant, and some other container that I don't even remember 🙈😆), 6W Fujitsu Futro S720 for OPNsense and some Watts for a couple of switches).

My Grafana dashboard says 81 watts at the moment. This includes a slightly beefy Intel computer running Proxmox, with a Kubernetes cluster inside, a few other small ARM servers, and my networking stack which is a router, 1 switch, 1 AP, and a modem. Also the main server is full of spinning rust disks. I haven't done much to optimize power consumption.

About 45W for my router, fiber endpoint, switch, three wireless APs and a Pi4 running Home Assistant. I've got a synology running separately that I suspect uses more, but I haven't measured it recently. Thinking about putting the synology in the crawlspace as it's kinda loud.

I downgraded recently and is now down to about 50 watt. My earlier server used 100+ watt, but the new one only 20 watt. I’m still considering downgrading my router as it is pretty overkill.

About 70 W for opnsense on a thin client, an Atom Proxmox and fanless 24 port switch. North of 6 kW if I fire up everything.

Probably a lot 😭😭 mine is an old gaming PC with a 3700x and a GTX 970, I try not to think about it. Still, cheaper than 10 streaming services.

Avarage load for me is around 300w running two T320s, a R510, and a NUC. The T320s are clustered running plex, 'arrs, pihole/unbound, game servers, and odoo. The nuc serves two purposes, firstly to keep quorum in the cluster and secondarily as a low power device to run a secondary pihole/unbound instance incase the power goes out as it's the only server that will stay on UPS power until the battery runs out. The R510 is my storage server with around 56TB and growing.

I am planning on adding a GPU server with a few tesla P40s as I've been using my workstation for these tasks which makes it difficult to use it for work.

Hmm according to homeassistant my Rack+PC consumed precisely this much over the last day (graph from homeassistant). I have been trying to minimize power consumption through more efficient hardware, but you can only go so far without making big sacrifices.

wow. unless you're doing lots of compute / AI stuff /crypto or have multiple servers or a big amount of spinning storage, i bet your 450W is far from 'efficient' without 'sacrifices'. You can have one decent cpu with a few cores, one or two spinning hdd and one or two ethernet NICs idling at 20W to 40W. probably also including a few VMs with light usage.

A single Xeon in an R630 with 256GB RAM and redundant PSUs idles around 100W, and that is with no storage controller or other add-in cards, no SSDs or HDDs. Stick some storage, add-in cards and actual load and you could easily see 300W+

Add in a UPS with some conversion losses and some switches, maybe a couple PoE injectors... 600W isn't so far away

Yes we are looking at 2-3 generation old servers, but what do you expect for a home lab? It would be silly to pay a premium for newer equipment solely in the name of efficiency as the costs will far outweigh the energy savings. If you just care about being "green" then your money could do more spent elsewhere.

Sure one can run off old domestic hardware like old laptops/PCs or SBCs like a NUC/RPi but some of us are either trying to replicate a production environment or want/need ECC memory (or both).

Please don't belittle other people's setup just because you might not understand their motivations/constraints or think you might be able to do it "better".

Edit: Not to mention the parent comment said this includes his PC. My PC is a bastion of inefficiency when playing games; have you seen the TDP on current gen CPUs and GPUs?

Dude, chill. This isn't how that works. While a server that consumes as much as a few mordern lightbulbs will almost always be something like energy efficient if it does any kind of real work.... This simply isn't the case when we're talking about half a kilowatt. And you don't say my pc has X components and consumes Y amount of power, therefore it's efficient. You measure that against the job it's doing.

It's like with a big truck and fuel efficency. It would be very inefficient to buy a big truck only to drive your daughter to school. But the same big truck might be very efficient at hauling large quantities of stuff through the country. The same applies to your setup. Good for you, for owning a CPU, memory and so on. I too have a few generations old Xeon, ECC ram and hard disks. This doesn't tell me anything about efficiency without knowing what you DO with all of that energy. Hence my (implied) question...

But you're right. I wasn't paying close attention to the diagram. It is 220W - 320W for their rack/stuff and 450W when they also start up their pc.