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by horsawlarway 1231 days ago
The short answer - Live somewhere very hot and humid. In my case - Atlanta.

Add an old house on top and throw in working from home, and usage can creep up on you very quickly. We average around 1000kwh a month, but summer months where it's 95+ and near 100% humidity means the AC reasonably needs to be on.

Jun/Jul are the worst, we hit 2200kwh over those months last year.

As for the machines - like I mentioned, they run a k8s cluster I host numerous services on. I run seafile/bookstack/jellyfin/keycloak/homeassistant/email/dns/mealie/snipeit/etc on them. Most idle around 5watts and aren't a big deal. I recycle the machines that would end up costing me real money in power usage.

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I'll add - my next personal project is going to be moving the entire cluster over to a dedicated solar system. As long as I don't do any grid-tie, I can do it without permits. Just waiting to find a decent deal on inverters at this point. Since I already have a pallet of used panels.