So my KW/h rate has gone from 0.0817 to 0.1315 in the last two years. I went from paying $219 a month for electric to $450+ and I could no longer justify this and needed to take action - this is what I have done.

  • For storage I had 3-R710’s with 6-4tb drives each, I moved to a new to me QNAP with 6 brand new 20tb WD Red drives and moved all of the data to that and unplugged the R710’s.
  • I moved ESXi and Guests from an r630 to a new to me Dell Precision 3650.
  • I moved PFSense from an R410 to a new to me Protectli Vault micro appliance.
  • I retired the Cisco Catalyst 3560-X in favor of a new to me low power HPE 48p selectable POE switch.
  • I put my backup host (Dell Optiplex with a 4th gen i5) running Veeam on a smart switch. I have a script that shuts the computer down after the backups complete and then an hour later the smart switch powers off. The smart switch powers on the computer and I have the bios set to power on the computer after a power outage. This happens three times a week.
  • I set a group policy to set the Windows power plan to balanced from high performance for my computer and my GFs computer. This has dropped both of our computers from using 150w+ to 20-30w at idle. Identical computers 11900k/3080ti EVGA FTW3
  • My torrent host is another Dell Optiplex with a 10th gen i5, I have that set to Windows power saver mode and max 45% CPU / min 0%, it uses less than 1w at idle now.
  • I recently install a whole home energy monitor into my main panel and integrated it into HomeAssistant so I can log and monitor. (see imgur picture)
  • On top of all of this I have set my water heater from 145F to 135F, unplugged unused devices in unused rooms too.

I am happy to say my mini production environment is now running stronger and cooler, the ambient air temp in the basement has dropped from 86F to 70F. The best part of this is I just got my latest energy bill. I went from $510 last month to $270 this month! Nothing else has changed other than what I have posted here today.

Check out this screenshot of the energy monitor, with both gaming desktops, both fans, and all the basement lights and TV/AV receiver powered right now, I am only using 600ish watts! Before that I was using over 2.5kw/h
https://imgur.com/a/uqblvyw

​

  • ripnetuk@alien.topBEnglish
    1·
    1 year ago

    I have been on a similar quest. I’ve gone from 500w to 50w over the last few years, starting with 2 r710s pimped out to the max, to a flash only white box athlon build. Slightly miss idrac, but a decent trade for it being 50w and so quiet I can only tell it’s on by the LEDs.

      • ripnetuk@alien.topBEnglish
        1·
        1 year ago

        Thank you, but in all honesty, this white box job boots so fast I no longer have to babysit the boot process, and on the rare occasion I need to mess with it at firmware level, ill just walk out to the garage :) given how far ive come, another 10w or so running a KVM would reduce my power saving from the pleasing 90% ive achived :)

  • FraggedYourMom@alien.topBEnglish
    1·
    1 year ago

    Don’t turn off the smart switch! Power cycle when you want the machine to boot. Killing all power will drain your CMOS battery faster because there is no standby power. Last thing you want is finding out your backups failed or drives got corrupted because it was no longer booting to the OS and getting a hard shutdown repeatedly.

    • CameronDev@programming.devEnglish
      1·
      1 year ago

      Do you have a source for that claim? I power off my desktop contantly and have done so for years, and i have only replaced 1 CMOS battery ever. Which was for a 9 year old motherboard. So i am a bit skeptical.

  • oasuke@alien.topBEnglish
    1·
    1 year ago

    There’s always a trade off between performance and saving electricity. You cannot have both

  • Beetanz@alien.topBEnglish
    1·
    1 year ago

    I just built an off grid solar array. But I’m already utilizing mostly low power/ consumer equipment. Reducing the number of hosts would hurt uptime though.

  • cylemmulo@alien.topBEnglish
    1·
    1 year ago

    This is the way. As cool as enterprise servers are it’s nice to have a setup where my servers are 1/10th the size, and power consumption, as well as have more compute.

  • SkipTam@alien.topBEnglish
    1·
    1 year ago

    I had 2x R710 couple years back. I downgraded to a Ryzen self built system when my Price went from 26c kw/h to 32c kw/h. Now i “Downgraded” (Feels more like an upgrade) again to a Lenovo mini PC because my price went up top 40c kw/h. It sips 7w idle and up to 30w when transcoding. Those things are grad. I’m thinking of getting a couple more and running them as a hyperconverged cluster. Sad times nowadays how expensive everything is getting.

  • gargravarr2112@alien.topBEnglish
    1·
    1 year ago

    Power in the UK has gone through the roof. I’ve downsized my lab as much as I can and have at times wondered if I should shut it down completely.

    Originally I was running an EdgeRouter 4, Zyxel 48-port managed switch and custom-built NAS with an i3-9100T, 32GB ECC and 6x 12TB SAS drives in a zpool. The NAS did everything - VMs, storage, backups etc. but it was pulling quite a lot of power.

    A while back I ran a USFF PC as my server, which idled at 8W. Versus my 200W Xeon machine at the time, it paid for itself in 12 months. I dug that out and moved the VMs onto it. Storage went onto an ARM NAS. I was running too many VMs for a single USFF even maxed out, so I bought another 2 of them (identical). Now I run them in a Proxmox cluster. I use a passive cooled HP 1810 managed switch and an EdgeRouter Lite for the network, plus an Apple Airport with its transmitter dialled down to 25%. The ARM machine is much slower than my ZFS NAS, but it is much lighter on power - at that point, the HDDs are the significant draw, so I only run 2 spinners that are non-redundant and make sure they’re backed up to cold storage. I also power up my ZFS machine once a month or so and sync the data from it. Other than that, I keep the big x86 machines shut down until needed.

    • midcoast207@alien.topBEnglish
      1·
      1 year ago

      Damn! Dialing back your wifi tx power is taking energy conservation to the next level! 250 mW is just way too high, better drop it to 65 mW!

  • Brilliant_Sound_5565@alien.topBEnglish
    1·
    1 year ago

    I’m glad I don’t run a server like this anymore, used.to years ago, migrated it all over to centralized nas storage and mini pcs running proxmox, uses a quarter of the power of one of these big old servers, no noise other then the large 10cm fan in the back of the nas. Much better for home use for me anyway and I can leave it on 24/7 without the worry of leaving it on

  • Antexa@alien.topBEnglish
    1·
    1 year ago

    Do you mind to share your Yaml file from your HA dashboard ? :) Amazing reduction cost, nicely done

  • priestoferis@alien.topBEnglish
    1·
    1 year ago

    Could you add a little detail about the energy monitoring? What kind of hardware is that? I guess it measures overall power usage?