Power usage
Power usage
I am smarting up my home with lots of ZigBee thingies and decided to add a ZigBee smart monitor to my selfhost setup.
Its a desktop box with a core i7 9th gen, 48gb ram, no monitor.
I used to have 4xSSD 4TB + 2xHDD 6TB. Three RAID1 for a total of 4+4+6=14Tbs.
Power was sitting at 50W.
I restructured my storage: 1 RAID5 with the 4 SSDs (12tb) and removed the 2 HDDs.
Power went down to 38W!
I am amazed.
In the future will run just 1 hdd for storing backups and keep it spinned down 99% of the time.
PS: the above wattage is during transcoding, so with high CPU and disk usage....
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And here I am with a 5 server cluster, 2x custom servers running opnsense for redundancy (8gbps internet connection needs real horsepower for IDS/firewall/routing), and a 36 bay storage truenas node... that's getting upgraded to 72 bay version for more drives (34 additional drives ready for install RIGHT NOW)... I see your 50 and 38 W... and raise you
This
2200-ish watts? Oh... and cooling the servers to keep them to about 75 degrees intake temp.
So really closer to 3400 watts.
Taking your numbers of 6 watts saved per drive would only save me 180w currently and 432w after I install the additional 32 drives next week. I'd still be in the 3kW territory.
...
I also have solar...
I generate (orange) enough to export (purple) a little during the day... but that's about it... Battery (light green) usage just kills peak hours.
The electrical usage costs me about $100-110 a month in electricity after solar ($0.06 per kWh), probably closer to $150 if solar wasn't eating up a bunch of it. Less than subscriptions to all the shit that I'm hosting for myself by a long long shot. Forget the family and other users.
More information... Not even remotely necessary to read.
Nextcloud - 5TB, google drive is $10/mo for 2TB
MSTY - AI stuff, another $10/mo subscription if you want google gemini. $20 for ChatGPT. Minecraft - private, $5 a month minimum. Probably closer to $10 for reasonable specs to do anything with the kiddos.
Email - 1TB across all users right now, ~$5 minimum for just me, though I'm oversize for many platforms as I have everything going back to 2006 or so. So probably close to $8-10 for just me.
Private search aggregator - apparently a paid service now with the likes of kagi. $10
Home assistant - $6.50 through nobucasa.
$46-66 on this stuff alone...Frigate... 8 cameras with corals for inferencing. God know what that cost would be. I keep 30 days of 24 hours, 6 months of detected items and 1 year of snapshots. I'm at 50TB of usage there. This probably could/should be cut down significantly, at least halved. but even 25TB is a fuck-ton of money per month on any VPS/hosted system. Ring's plan is about half what I'm doing at $20/mo. No idea what other services would end up being. Not even sure how ring and other make money at that cost when storage is expensive otherwise.
Paperless-ngx, lubelog, grocy, gramps for organization/documentation would need a VPS service... or migrating to a non-hosted solution (so can't really be shared easily, or shared through google docs sort of thing).
Self-hosted things like lemmy, mastodon, matrix, peertube, etc... VPS costs would be something substantial as well. And business operation stuff like my invoices, jump hosts, secure vms, etc...
And lastly, the cost of owning my own data... where no company can spy on me. Or monetize me in ads. Invidious, my own dns with custom rules for me vs the kids, etc...etc..etc... Priceless.
Then multiply the parts of the list for other users on my system (wife, both kids, father, etc...)
And of course the massive porn collection... Gotta have that on a moments notice.
Thank you, very insightful.
That's a lot of power. Consider where I live having 3kWh for domestic use is standard. I have 6kWh due to the PV, and its highly unusual.
Also, at my energy costs that would be ridiculously expensive, and way out of any justification, PV or not PV.
Even only sustain 3kWh just for self host would be madness. And the cost would be unsustainable as well.
The point that you "save" on the various subscription is moot, IMO, as those would never be subscribed in the first place at my house, so the "saving" is purely a luxury justification.
No, for domestic use only that is pure madness. I admire, and envy, you a lot... don't get me wrong, but that just prove you want / can splurge on fancy toys ad much as if you purchased a huge SUV just to go grocery shopping.
Most of the hardware itself was free(business decommissioned) or auction wins (4.5TB of ram out of a $600 auction, selling some servers paid the whole auction off). So quite cheap in that respect. And it's not strictly private use. Lots of functions in there to keep my business going/make it easier to track taxes/auto billing clients/email/etc. Though only typically operationally, not as an income generator itself (eg, not hosting other companies stuff so much).
And yeah, if energy was 10x more expensive (I think it was you or someone else that said $0.60 per kWh?) I'd probably rethink my situation/stance a bit.
But 3kW service is awfully low. Standard around here is 200amp service to a house (at 120v, so 24kVA service), 100amp (12kVA) if you have gas utilities handling range/heating, as A/C is heavily required where I live. My PV setup is rated 15.9kW, though caps out at 11kW on the best days. I can't imagine living off of 3kW. My desktop uses 1/10th of that. My idle usage in my house minus the servers is ~2kW. I can see why you're squeezing Watts. Some googling shows Italy being a country that does this... You probably are in similar situation as them where A/C isn't really common, heating and cooking isn't electric based, etc... Most of the year I'm not allowed to even make a fire, so I'm forced to rely on electricity.
But no SUV here... 1 hybrid sedan for this family of 4. Gas costs too much and we drive too little.
I missed the business part... That make absolutely sense and gives out a different prospect. Here, you would be able to write off taxes all your home rig expenses I think.
Yes, factoring in all energy costs (including the public television tax which is part of your utility bills) energy cost me 60€c per kWh.
We use gas extensively, but for heating I use wood pellets with an idro-stove (heats the water that then circulate in the heaters).
In summer I can use ac for those nights that doesn't cool off, but during the day having 50cm thick stone walls never heats up enough inside. Winter are a different story, heating is on from 1 October to 1 of may, and here Home Assistant with per-room ZigBee thermostats and thermovalves is helping a lot to keep the pellet usage down to 2x15kg bags per day when its below freezing outside in daytime.
Until we upgraded from 3kWh to 6kWh (at nice 300€ price point) we frequently had the power disconnected because the oven was on while drying hairs... Or washer and toaster... What a fun ride.
3kWh is actually enough only for a condo, not for a house, but still it's how it works here.
All my hardware is refurbished from work, got it from surplus or things going to be dismissed. And way overpowered for the services I run (full arr stack, Usenet and torrents, WebDAV and filebrowser sharing, navidrome jellyfin actual budget homepage romm radicale and stuff I surely forgot).
I even have two ISPs for redundancy because living in the woods make it unreliable, so FWA (5G 300mbps but capped) and FTTC (20 shitty mbps but uncapoed) it is.