I wonder if my system is good or bad. My server needs 0.1kWh.
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You might have your units confused.
0.1kWh over how much time? Per day? Per hour? Per week?
Watthours refer to total power used to do something, from a starting point to an ending point. It makes no sense to say that a device needs a certain amount of Wh, unless you’re talking about something like charging a battery to full.
Power being used by a device, (like a computer) is just watts.
Think of the difference between speed and distance. Watts is how fast power is being used, watt-hours is how much has been used, or will be used.
If you have a 500 watt PC, for example, it uses 500Wh, per hour. Or 12kWh in a day.
I forgive 'em cuz watt hours are a disgusting unit in general
idea what unit speed change in position over time meters per second m/s acceleration change in speed over time meters per second, per second m/s/s=m/s² force acceleration applied to each of unit of mass kg * m/s² work acceleration applied along a distance, which transfers energy kg * m/s² * m = kg * m²/s² power work over time kg * m² / s³ energy expenditure power level during units of time (kg * m² / s³) * s = kg * m²/s² Work over time, × time, is just work! kWh are just joules (J) with extra steps! Screw kWh, I will die on this hill!!! Raaah
Could be worse, could be BTU. And some people still use tons (of heating/cooling).
Power over time could be interpreted as power/time. Power x time isn’t power, it’s energy (=== work). But otherwise I’m with you. Joules or gtfo.
Whoops, typo! Fixed c:
kWh is the stupidest unit ever. kWh = 1000J/s * 6060s = 3.610^6J so 0.1kWh = 360kJ
If you have a 500 watt PC, for example, it uses 500Wh, per hour. Or 12kWh in a day.
A maximum of 500 watts. Fortunately your PC doesn’t actually max out your PSU or your system would crash.
Mate, kWh is a measure of electricity volume, like gallons is to liquid. Also, 100 watt hours would be a much more sensical way to say the same thing. What you’ve said in the title is like saying your server uses 1 gallon of water. It’s meaningless without a unit of time. Watts is a measure of current flow (pun intended), similar to a measurement like gallons per minute.
For example, if your server uses 100 watts for an hour it has used 100 watt hours of electricity. If your server uses 100 watts for 100 hours it has used 10000 watts of electricity, aka 10kwh.
My NAS uses about 60 watts at idle, and near 100w when it’s working on something. I use an old laptop for a plex server, it probably uses like 50 watts at idle and like 150 or 200 when streaming a 4k movie, I haven’t checked tbh. I did just acquire a BEEFY network switch that’s going to use 120 watts 24/7 though, so that’ll hurt the pocket book for sure. Soon all of my servers should be in the same place, with that network switch, so I’ll know exactly how much power it’s using.
Idles at around 24W. It’s amazing that your server only needs .1kWh once and keeps on working. You should get some physicists to take a look at it, you might just have found perpetual motion.
.1kWh is 100Wh
Good point. Now it does make sense. I know the secret to the perpetual motion machine now.
This is a factual but irrelevant statement
I ate sushi today.
I came here to tell my tiny Raspberry pi 4 consumes ~10 watt, But then after noticing the home server setup of some people and the associated power consumption, I feel like a child in a crowd of adults 😀
I have an old desktop downclocked that pulls ~100W that I’m using as a file server, but I’m working on moving most of my services over to an Intel NUC that pulls ~15W. Nothing wrong with being power efficient.
I’m using an old laptop with the lid closed. Uses 10w.
All in, including my router, switches, modem, laptop, and NAS, I’m using 50watts +/- 5.
It does everything I need, and I feel like that’s pretty efficient.
we’re in the same boat, but it does the job and stays under 45°C even under load, so I’m not complaining
Quite the opposite. Look at what they need to get a fraction of what you do.
Or use the old quote, “they’re compensating for small pp”
My server rack has
- 3x Dell R730
- 1x Dell R720
- 2x Cisco Catalyst 3750x (IP Routing license)
- 2x Netgear M4300-12x12f
- 1x Unifi USW-48-Pro
- 1x USW-Agg
- 3x Framework 11th Gen (future cluster)
- 1x Protectli FE4B
All together that draws… 0.1 kWh… in 0.327s.
In real time terms, measured at the UPS, I have a running stable state load of 900-1100w depending on what I have at load. I call it my computationally efficient space heater because it generates more heat than is required for my apartment in winter except for the coldest of days. It has a dedicated 120v 15A circuit
Good lord, how much does electricity cost where you are? Combined with the air conditioning to keep the space livable, that would be prohibitively expensive for me
It’s always wild reading the power draw people wrote here.
I knew it was because this is a US & Europe centric site and many people from homelabs actually run Enterprise size rigs, but my 4 member household run on 2kW for the entire house lol and 75℅ of that is just A/C we use at night.
On cold winter days, we can average 6kW over 24h, but peak is more like 10 I’d 13. Not talking just about my space heaters with embedded computing power and TBs of storage, but the whole household.
Yeah it’s a bit of a chonk. I don’t remember the exact itemization on the power bill and I don’t have one in front of me.
9 spinning disks and a couple SSD’s - Right around 190 watts, but that also includes my router and 3 PoE WiFi AP’s. PoE consumption is reported as 20 watts, and the router should use about 10 watts, so I think the server is about 160 watts.
Electricity here is pretty expensive, about $.33 per kWh, so by my math I’m spending $38/month on this stuff. If I didn’t have lots of digital media it’d be worth it to get a VPS probably. $38/month is still cheaper than Netflix, HBO, and all the other junk I’d have to subscribe to.
That’s true. And the children of my family see no ads which is priceless. Yet I am looking into ways to cut costs in half by using an additional lower powered mini pc which is always on and the main computer only running in the evening - maybe.
Same here. 300w with 12 disks, switches, and router. But electricity only costs $.12/kwh. I wouldn’t trust having terabytes of data in the cloud.
17W for an N100 system with 4 HDD’s
Which HDDs? That’s really good.
Seagate Ironwolf “ST4000VN006”
I do have some issues with read speeds but that’s probably networking related or due to using RAID5.
That’s pretty low with 4 HDD’s. One of my servers use 30 watts. Half of that is from the 2 HDD’s in it.
@meldrik @qaz I’ve got a bunch of older, smaller drives, and as they fail I’m slowly transitioning to much more efficient (and larger) HGST helium drives. I don’t have measurements, but anecdotally a dual-drive USB dock with crappy 1.5A power adapter (so 18W) couldn’t handle spinning up two older drives but could handle two HGST drives.
Between 50W (idle) and 140W (max load). Most of the time it is about 60W.
So about 1.5kWh per day, or 45kWh per month. I pay 0,22€ per kWh (France, 100% renewable energy) so about 9-10€ per month.
Are you including nuclear power in renewable or is that a particular provider who claims net 100% renewable?
Net 100% renewable, no nuclear. I can even choose where it comes from (in my case, a wind farm in northwest France). Of course, not all of my electricity come from there at all time, but I have the guaranty that renewable energy bounds equivalent to my consumption will be bought from there, so it is basically the same.
Thanks. I buy Vattenfall but make net 2/3rds of my own power via rooftop solar.
About 700 watts, it makes for a decent space heater in the winter.
I’m right around the same level, and it actually keeps my server room / workshop at comfortable temperature during the winter. I also have my gaming PC mounted in my server rack; when that’s running, there are times where my AC will still kick in even when it’s 40 degrees outside.
For the whole month of November. 60kWh. This is for all my servers and network equipment. On average, it draws around 90 watt.
How you measuring this? Looks very neat.
Shelly plug, integrated into Home Assistant.
Looks like home assistant
My 10 year old ITX NAS build with 4 HDDs used 40W at idle. Just upgraded to an Aoostart WTR Pro with the same 4 HDDs, uses 28W at idle. My power bill currently averages around US$0.13/kWh.
I think at max 200w? It runs a collection of fedi/self service stuff.
I also run a pi with a couple of apps on a pi 3 that sips power.
It’s a legitimate issue because it’s 50+ cents per killowat hour where I live so power is very expensive…
That seems really high, I think power where I live is about 12-14 cents per kilowatt hour. What makes it so expenses where you live?
Mostly just that they can. It’s more expensive per tier actually.
https://www.pge.com/assets/pge/docs/account/rate-plans/residential-electric-rate-plan-pricing.pdf
Take a look, this is the old pricing. They just voted to up it again.
There’s legislation that is moving along to charge people with solar because…idk.
They’re charging for solar because PGE is a greedy fuck.
Yes. There was talk locally for local government to take control of the power but it’s just talk…
It gets over 110 where I live in the summer…so air conditioning can make it very expensive.
Wait this is in the US? How, this is even more expensive than Hawaii, and they have obvious reasons for power to be more expensive there
PGE serves Northern California. They keep raising rates like 10-15% each year to cover their losses after all the wildfires a couple years ago and because of the greed.
Take note, folks. Watch this trend spread.
Yep. And they are talking about a couple more price hikes next year. Significant ones.
Damn, I wish ours was that cheap. We’re roughly $.30/kwh, mostly because our local poco is a reseller of SCE and we’re in a rural area.
Holy shit. I’m paying less than 10c per kwh even in the “high usage” tier.
I wish that was ours…
that’s insane, i pay like 5¢ a KWh
Want to switch?
There are some really efficient systems out there, but power requirements depend a lot on what is run.
A simple website is very different that a photo gallery running content ID for example.
My server with 8 hard drives uses about 60 watts and goes up to around 80 under heavy load. The firewall, switch, access points and modem use another 50-60 watts.
I really need upgrade my server and firewall to something about 10 years newer, it would reduce my power consumption quite a bit and I would have a lot more runtime on UPS.
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Ugh, I need to get off my ass and install a rack and some fiber drops to finalize my network buildout.
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I was drawing an average of 2.5kWh after a week of monitoring my whole rack
That doesn’t seem right; that’s only ~18W. Each one of those systems alone will exceed that at idle running 24/7. I’d expect 1-2 orders of magnitude more.
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after a week of runtime it told me 2.5kwh average. could be average per hour
If it gives you kWh as a measure for power, you should toss it because it’s obviously made by someone who had no idea what they were doing.
