I’ll just come out and say it: 50W. I know, I know an order of magnitude above what’s actually needed to host websites, media center and image gallery.

But it is a computer I had on-hand and which would be turned on a quarter of the day anyway. And these 50W also warm my home, although this is less efficient than the heat pump, of course.

What’s your usage? What do you host?

  • mlaga97
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    10 months ago

    ~120W with an old server motherboard and 6 spinning drives (42TB of storage overall).

    Currently running Nextcloud, Home Assistant, Gitea, Matrix, Jellyfin, Lemmy, Mastodon, Vaultwarden, and a bunch of other smaller stuff alongside storing a few months worth of surveillance footage, so ~$12/month in power certainly ain’t a bad deal versus paying for hosted versions of even a fraction of those services.

    • mlaga97
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      10 months ago

      I have looked at the ROI for getting more efficient kit and ended up discovering that going for something like a low-idle-power-draw system like a NUC or thin client and a disk enclosure has a return period on the order of multiple years.

      Based on that information, I’ve instead put that money towards lower hanging fruit in the form of upgrading older inefficient appliances and adding multi-zone temperature control for power savings.

      The energy savings I’ve been able to make based on long-term energy use data collected via Home Assistant has more than offset all of the electricity I’ve ever used to power the system itself.