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
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That is an insane power bill even after your cuts. Do you have the option of solar? With your power usage you should pay it off super fast when your bills drop to near zero?
I’m confused. How much was your idle draw before in total?
One of the best things I did for my homelab is swap from 2 120w Xeon servers to a single Intel 12400 machine. Went from $4-5 of power a day to $1-$1.50.
bought an used hp proliant dl380 gen9 with 128GB ECC RAM and 2xE-5 2650v3 xeon 2x500W power supplies… just to test installed ubuntu got powertop, set acpi devices to autotune, modded the ilo for fan adjustment and i am at 55W in idle.
before i have had a self made ryzen “server” with Ryzen 3700x 32GB RAM and a Nvidia GTX 1080 sitting at 130W Idle…
thats what i have to say for industrial servers ;-)
0.13 would save me a lot of money
Damn you had a lot of hardware for not a lot of use. Everyone wants enterprise gear but forgets it’s power hungry.
Yup
this is why I jumped the meter when I bought my home. has a smart meter :-)
What are you running in the Precision 3650 and what was the cost for it?
What I did, which probably applies to almost nobody: Downgraded my home servers to a single Beelink Mini PC; still gets the job done, though it is slower. Offloaded a bunch of stuff, including backups and video stuff, to my much more powerful work server and NAS. My work has a lease with electricity included. (It’s my business, so I’m not doing anything fishy.) Old hardware is sitting unused. The one downside to this is that my older setup was using ~20% CPU all the time, whereas the new one uses like ~60% and goes to 100% at peaks. I don’t notice it in practice.
Also, I added solar panels to my house. So even if I were paying for my older setup, it would’ve been covered.
That’s impressive.
I’m crying in .35p/kwh ($0.43)
What’s that HPE switch model?
I’m running a Cisco 2960X atm and an Aruba 2930F JL258A currently.
I also have 2 Cisco WS-C3560CX-8PC-S and 3 C1000-8FP-2G-S switches I can swap things out for.
Waiting for “winter” to get here in the south so I can run some ethernet cable through the attic to a few places and finally mount my network rack on the wall.