[Karrot_Kream]

I'm always curious about the power cost here. Everyone I've talked to who runs servers at home either lives in a low COL area where electricity is cheap (and electricity is dirty, but I don't really want to get into that) or just pays the power as a sort of "cost of playing around" which is completely fair (it's not like I need to use my table saw at home.) Most folks I know who run servers use a lot more power than I do at home. Of course I don't know how much of that is just that the folks that build expensive homelabs being attracted to beefy, power hog servers as opposed to an actual incentive to cut power costs.

[aftbit]

My rack draws around 750W at mid-idle (not totally idle but not doing anything big either). I have about $0.14/kWh delivered electricity cost in southwest Ohio. This means the rack costs me approximately $77 per month or approximately $920 per year. That's not a particular small cost, but it is far less than I would pay to host the same things at a professional data center, or shivers the cloud.

If I really wanted to optimize for power efficiency, I could do much better. I've seen decent homelab setups (with NAS, router, switch, and some slow compute nodes) that run under 100W, which would cost me only $10 per month in power, and would be far more powerful than a small DigitalOcean droplet.

[znpy]

> I've seen decent homelab setups (with NAS, router, switch, and some slow compute nodes) that run under 100W, which would cost me only $10 per month in power, and would be far more powerful than a small DigitalOcean droplet.

I do some homelabbing at home and i do work for some "big tech". The difference, essentially, is reliability and high availability.

Most homelab posts i see are one decent (not even large) disaster away from losing everything.

I do something in that space at home, mostly around data backup and replication, but i am well aware that in case of decent disaster I'd probably be at least a couple of days offline (potentially up to one or two weeks).

Most people underestimate facet of the discussion.

[sgarland]

Agreed. Most people seem to take a very cavalier approach to backups, for example, or using risky Ceph/ZFS setups without understanding the consequences.

In the absolute worst-case scenario for me, barring a lightning strike that fried my UPS and entire rack, I would lose a day’s worth of changes, as my backup node kicks on daily to ingest snapshots. Downtime would probably be 15 minutes or so - boot up backup, change target IP address on other nodes to access it.

I’m only running RAIDZ1, so I’d have to lose two disks in a VDEV for this to occur. I understand and accept the risks, but were I hosting anything of import, I’d probably accept the additional power draw of keeping the backup server on 24/7 and stream snapshots to it continuously.

Also, of course, I’d be streaming those snapshots off-site. Currently I do so for things like photos and documents.

If I lost 2/3 of my compute nodes, I’d be down for a bit longer, as I’d have to shift workloads to the backup server (which is a dual socket with enough RAM to handle it), and currently it doesn’t run K8s. I can shift things to Docker Compose easily enough, or I suppose I could register it as a worker node that’s just tainted most of the time.

[Karrot_Kream]

I'm posting this just to compare power rates not to win an internet fight. My power bill is tiered, and at the lowest tier I'm paying double your rates ($0.28 / kWh.) Once I add a rack like that on I'd probably be bumping up to the next tier which will increase my power to something like 2.5-3x that rate. Because of the tiered system even my non-server load will be metered at a higher cost. It's really not worth it here to run servers at home if I'm not being highly power conscious.

[namibj]

Meanwhile in Germany, the tiers are the other way around: base fees and meter costs increase effective rate at the low-consumption end, while you end up with only (even discounted, somewhat, usually!) per-kWh rates dominating at high consumption. Industrial loads also get assessed for peak power sustained for like a few minutes at least once a year, to reflect capex/depreciation of sufficiently-overprovisioned distribution transformers and other related last-mile power-handling capacity. This is relatively negligible if you average over 10% of your peak draw, though. And even beyond, recent energy prices Matt have shifted the balance spot to even more-peaky consumption.

[doubled112]

I looked into cloud, but it's just not really feasible. It really is possible to do a lot with a little at home.

I'm using about 60-100W for my home-prod, and a lot of it is "older". I'm running about 15 small VMs at any given time these days, and probably 20 containers.

I think my biggest single draw is the Mikrotik CCR1036 in the garage, but it saved me from buying new gear. Sure there's a break even point with hydro, but that's years in the future when the device is free. It's also pretty fun to watch VPN connections testing at 700Mbps from home.

I don't really care about uptime, and I've got gigabit fibre to the house, so bandwidth isn't a huge problem. It worked fine on 300/60Mb cable too.

Ryzen 3 2200G, 32GB RAM, 1T NVMe, 10TB HDD. This one runs services.

Orange Pi 5 16GB with another 500GB NVMe. This runs redundant services and monitoring.

[_jal]

My rack lives in an expensive energy market, and pulls just under 500W. Almost 40% of that is a Dell R430, which by itself costs about $50/mo to run.

Next time I have the energy (hah) for this flavor of home maintenance, the idea is to split the work it does off to a few fanless systems, I'm pretty sure I can knock at least 100W off that. Main challenge there is storage - I have a SAS shelf and need a low-wattage machine that speaks SF-8088.

Experimented some with a couple Raspberry Pis for some things, but they just don't seem built to run 24/7. One lasted about 4 months, the other died at about 12. (They PXEbooted, no local storage, it wasn't that.)

[radlad]

I have a Plex server with 6 spinning disks and a GPU which costs me around $20/month. The most expensive part is when the GPU is running (based on my Kill-A-Watt.) I host around 15 Docker services on it.

I think even with the cost of electricity, you can easily beat cloud hosting on a per-month basis. But, factoring in the initial cost of hardware and electricity, it's probably a wash.

But then, if you're running a hypervisor, and would otherwise have a LOT of VMs in the cloud, maybe it swings back the other way?

[jdoss]

My quarter rack Home lab in my basement is pulling 133 Watts right now with a low power 1U Supermicro SOC, an older Supermicro mini tower used as a NAS, and my networking gear and Internet modems. I don't have any intense workloads running at home. I was really power conscious when buying my two home servers as I know it is very easy to buy a beefy server off of Ebay that sounds like a jet engine 24/7 and pay out the nose on my home power bill.

[sgarland]

My rack is about 500W, up to about 700W when the backup server kicks on (lots of spinning disks).

That’s a UniFi Dream Machine Pro, UniFi 24 port switch (powering two APs), 3x Dell R620s with a few SSDs and NVMe, and 2x Supermicros (one of which is the aforementioned backup server), each with a lot of spinners. Also some additional load from the overhead of the rack UPS.

I pay about $0.08/kWh, although with the base fee of $40 it's more like $0.11/kWh. In any case, it means I pay maybe an extra $30-40/month for my homelab, plus whatever additional heat load costs it places on my A/C.

If I moved to somewhere where electricity was significantly pricier, I would probably either invest in home solar, compress compute to a single node, or both.

[entropyie]

Don't forget that if you live in a cooler climate, server heat can offset heating bills if you host at home.