So ive never really paid attention to the power I consume running various servers over the years but now that ive cleaned up and consolidated im trying to gauge my power draw compared to others.
I run a Proxmox host with 13 HDDs, 6 NVMe drives and 2 U2 NVME drives, a Quattro P2200, RTX A2000, RTX 4070, Epyc CPU, HBA for HDDs, NVMe Card 4x4.
A Synology 2422 with 4SSD, 2 HDDs
A Synology expansion with 8 HDDs
I run about 500 watts off the wall for all this stuff and I think this is the lower end as I wasn't using the GPUs. That includes a couple switches as well. Very silent runs very cool.
All these comments are making me think about how I’d create the minimum power-use homelab. Was looking at 3 year old servers but now I’m thinking just building a low power but powerful system that uses very low power at idle but when in use I’m less worried as it’s more about getting the job done.
for PVR (1 HDD), server(4 HDDs), and all those wall warts, standalone clocks, switches, CPE, battery chargers I left plugged in, TV and monitor standby power,...
looks like a steady 330, single storage host 7 spinning disks, 4 SSDs, 4 rpi-4 with SSDs running k3s and the network stack (edgerouter 8-xg, 2 8 port poe switches and a 24 port es-24).
Changes I should make are to reduce drives / upgrade storage host in a couple of years and switch out to a single, larger poe switch (2.5G 24-48 ports), again in a couple of years.
Not including my office setup, that's just what's in the rack. MX7000 chassis with 7x MX740c blades, redundant 40G core switches, a fiber channel SAN, two 48-bay NAS with 10TB drives, and 240v power with a 5000W UPS.
Not including the AC for the garage that the rack is in.
Two small Synology units (DS120J and DS218+ with attached usb drives for backup), five-port gigabit switch and a modem router, in addition to a Proxmox host (HP 800 G3 mini) runs at about 40W with spun down hard drives, and somewhere around 50W when these are being accessed.
The Synology units automatically shut down at night, at which point the power draw drops to 24W.
It all comes down to about 0.85-0.9 kWh per day.
Assuming a price of 30c/kWh means that even this comparatively small power use comes up to 10€/month or so.
15-20W at idle for my all-SSD Ryzen server, 10W or so for networking (2.5GbE router), and around 10W for my personal machine at idle, so around 35-40W total for my stuff.
It's a simple machine - Ryzen 3 2200G, 48GB of DDR4-3200 running at 2933MHz, B550 mATX motherboard (most power-efficient AM4 chipset + has built-in 2.5GbE and PCIe 3.0 for all chipset lanes), with a mix of NVMe and SATA SSDs along with a few 4TB HDDs that are currently always off.
I went with the 2200G because I already had it, but you could easily get much better performance using a 5600G or 5300G, or a 4600G if you can find one.
Handles all my tasks no problem (PhotoPrism, Jellyfin, and general file server duties for the most part). I've got a big fat tower cooler on the CPU and I can't hear it even under full load.
It used to be a 3900X machine when I had much higher compute requirements but I swapped out the CPU when idle power became a bigger concern.
Dell T20, 2x Wyse 5070, Optiplex 3000 thin client. HP 600 g3 that total about 85 watts. A couple gigabit switches for about ten watts.
Trying to keep it under a hundred watts, but I go well over the T20 and/or the HP have heavy load. Luckily none of my workloads use that much CPU so it's under a hundred watts.
I have crazy expensive California power so with A/C each watt costs about $4 a year.
Lenovo Tiny m700 8th Gen i5, 32GB ram, USB SSD boot, Sata SSD storage, USB SSD Backup, extra m2 2.5ge nic to replace the wifi card. Run Proxmox with pfSense. About 11-15 Watts average. Spikes to 50 when running a batch job.
Considering a ZimaBoard but needs more RAM for the batch job.
But I have an Intel Arc A770 and 2 extra Samsung 980 Pro 2TB NVMe disks in an ASUS Hyper M.2 waiting to be installed when I get the time. I will be decommissioning a server when I do that though, so we'll see what the running costs end up being. Probably slightly higher overall.
Around 90-100W typical for the part of my lab actually powered on. That is my NAS (60W typical) that has five 12/14 TB hard drives attached to a C2750 and my VM Host (35W typical, but bounces between 20W and 40W), which has a couple of SSDs attached to a R7 1700.
Network stack: UDM-Pro, USW-Agg, USW-16-PoE, Raspberry Pi for DNS, VPN & monitoring, U-LTE-Pro, USW-Flex, G4-Bullet, 2x UAP-AC-Mesh, 2x UAP-AC-LR, 1x UAP-FlexHD sitting on a 500 VA UPS pulling ~100W.
Homeserver (24/7) is a Ryzen 3700X-system with 13 HDDs usually pulling around 150W on it's 1000VA UPS.
Power is quite expensive here in Germany, but the cost of small solar-setups is dropping, so I might setup a little PV-installation to offload costs. Would probably allow me to run more servers again^^
Have dropped from 500w (2 x R710) to 50-60w (5600X, 32Gb, 2 nvme drives, 3 sata SSDs, Coursir Platinum PSU, Gigabyte Mobo
Plus in the lab, I have a ONT and a small network switch (replacing a managed one saved 20w or so), and a work laptop, which brings the at the wall consumption of the entire lab to around 80-90w
Id be interested to see how folk with the Athlon processors are getting so much less power usage than me
10W for Proxmox host, 15W for small Synology, and that's about it. I don't know what the router and switch draw, probably nothing. It runs Nextcloud, Home Assistant, Immich, Arr suite, Tailscale, Adguard Home, Jellyfin and my website absolutely fine. I'd absolutely hate to consume more and I love my Apple Silicon Macs.
I just power everything off except a couple of Raspberry PIs when I'm not using it. I did the math and where I live, it's about $1/watt/year for loads that are on 24/7. It's just not worth $400/year to power something that usually idle.
Our house has got multiple fridge freezers, an induction hob, several sets of Tvs.& gaming consoles, a semi-dedicated home theatre and office, as well as a 3kw hot tub - the power bill for my homelab is a rounding error amongst all that.
|Last Battery Transfer
Line voltage notch or spike
|Internal Temperature
21.6°C|Runtime Remaining
2hr 1minute|
|:-|:-|:-|
|Load Power
13.0 %Watts|Apparent Load Power
11.7 %VA|Load Current
3.1 Amps|
Pre-SSD days I wondered the same thing so I purchase a power/watt meter to check my 6 disk RedHat LVM RAID-5 arrays...it was eye opening.
Electrical consumption alone, not even factoring in my stress "is it working", man-hours, backups, user/family training, UPS units, or drive/cassis hardware costs it was clearly cheaper to outsource storage.
45-50W during the day at home, 20-25W during the night as I shut down my server.
Swapped the PSU in that server which reduced the load by 10W, the previous one apparently was way oversized.
200-300W at my parent's basement permanently where I keep my storage servers with 36 HDDs in total. They have PV on the roof, a large battery in the basement and don't want to put excess power back into the grid so I was allowed to move my large servers there.
I assume you have a measurement wrong, 700kwh during the night means (in a span of 12 hours) a continuous load of 58000 watts. If not, nice datacenter you got there!
I have a Dell T620 tower and an R720 rack mount. The full rack consumes an average of 12 KWh every day.
Proxmox on both, but I use the T620 mostly as it has 12 x 3.5" bays, and I have 2 x NVME drives on PCI card. It also houses the Nvidia Quadro P2000 GPU.
Consequently, the tower is more useful, quieter, and under utilised.
This Christmas break, I plan to move any VMs I have on the R720, move some RAM to max out the tower, and sell the R720. It has 16 x 2.5" bays and an H720 in IT mode. It will keep 64Gb RAM, 8 x 200Gb SSD, and 8 x 1.2Tb HDDs (and 240Gb SATA SSD boot drive where the DVD used to be) for the new owner.
The plan is to recoup some cash and lower the power draw of my rack significantly.
As in average? 1491W 30 day average according to the power meter. Fully loading everything is around 5kW iirc though that doesn't really happen. Highest in last 30 days is 3774W peak and I think that's when I accidentally shut down the UPS so everything was booting at the same time after. I don't think I ever go over 3kW in normal circumstances.
Using 5 storage servers, 2 of which are storinators and 3 supermicros. And then two compute nodes which are Proliant DL380, g10 and a g11 that I just bought last week. Plus ofc some network gear which isn't really anything too fancy, it's just two routers, which while they do do PoE, I don't use it so they're not really high power or anything.
Idle ~1.2kw underload reasonably 2.5 to 3kw? Haven't really stress tested everything to see where I sit at 25% intervals yet. Still rebuilding my rack, office, and support pcs right now. Will have a better idea of exact figures later this week. Averaging 85kwh/day for the house. Everything either has extremely specific low power tasks such as home assistant or truenas or handles vm, production environments, game servers, or gaming for the most part.
About 50 watts. I downsized a few years ago, got rid of the unnecessary larger servers, moved to Intel nucs and a 4 disk nas for centralized storage. Was no need to run large servers at home, I play with them at work.
I run proxmox on the nucs with my servers in vms, each nuc has 16gb of ram and performance is fine
My entire rack idles around 160W, which includes switches, router, 3 cameras, 2 hotspots, and a server with a Xeon 2680 v4, 100GB of RAM and 50TB of storage, along with a 1650 Super for transcoding etc.
It’s nothing special. Server is custom, built in an Inter-Tech 4U case with 8 hotswap bays, using an x99 motherboard.
Networking is Ubiquiti, with a PoE-capable switch to provide power to access points and cameras.
A big difference was made by making ProxMox use a power plan that lets CPU go idle or clock down, which I think was good for like 20-25 watts. My Windows 10 VM is less responsive in RDP, but otherwise doesn’t seem affected, and the Linux-based VMs don’t seem to care.
You can get some good power meters from Ali. They have versions that go into sockets and versions that go around power lines. I have a single socket one, Atorch. They are readable remotely.
My entire rack is currently idle'ing at around 180 watts. That includes a 10 drive Unraid server with Ryzen 7 3700X. Plus I have a Dell mini-PC, HP EliteDesk G3, A older Apple Mac-Mini running Ubuntu server and a Lenovo m720q (OPNSense).
Of course I've never looked at how much the network stuff is using such as 2 switches, 4 x Access points, 2 x Raspberry Pi 3s (DNS/Pihole) and ISP provided fiber gateway box.