Kinda curious what people’s power draw is. Mine sits at about 50-60W at idle.
I’m kinda new to self hosting but I have immich and jellyfin severs. And then a little LLM role-playing game I made running locally on an older gaming laptop. It spikes up to like 170W for like 30 secords when playing when the “Dungeon Master” responds.
Idk just like to hear what other people got going on! I’ll probably still tinker to get my power draw down even more if possible
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250 W including all Network equipment, PoE Access Points and PoE cameras.
I don’t pay a dime for my energy though because I have an 18kWp solar array and a 20kwh home battery.
Built my own server to be completely silent since it lives in my living room. Based on an Intel i3-12100 with some NVMe and 5x SATA SSD’s, and running tons of containers. Does about 18W most of the time and it could have been lower with a different motherboard.
All the UniFi stuff (gateway, switches, APs) uses just under 50W though, so there’s little sense in spending more money on the server to shave off a few watts.
I haven’t measured, and I don’t wanna know. I have a full sized 42u rack almost full of goodies.
Raspberry Pi Zero 2. It maxes out at 15W, and runs at 0.5W idle.
If it can’t run on a Zero, I don’t want it.40w
It’s an old microATX build with 3 HDDs, 1 SSD, 1 M.2 and a Quadro P400 so I think 40w average is pretty good. It’s on 24/7 with no spin down.
My UnRaid server with 50 docker containers of various uses and a 1060ti all sitting in an old gaming rig is pretty steady at 80W
120-140w. That’s with 5 hard drives spinning 24/7 and now a GPU I added in there to do mostly nothing. Would be 100-120 without it.
.63W: N100 server with 2 HDD & 2 SSD. Cable modem. 5-port POE switch. WAP. Ooma VOIP device.
The POE & WAP are like 10W between them, but I had to add them to get strong enough wifi to one particular client. Authentik somehow consumes 3W. Immich also has a high idle load, so I leave it down most of the time.
Way too much. The Nvidia P40 I scavenged for my homemade AI server runs at 120W (throttled down from 250W default) on its own. Then I’ve got two more PCs running purely as redundant firewalls with automatic failover, pretty unnecessary but if that’s not the sort of thing homelabbing is for then I’m going to keep doing it wrong because I find it fun. Then there’s the minecraft server, which is pretty beefy and also eternally running at max CPU because my niece is a monster who loves spamming spawn eggs and should never be allowed access to creative mode. And I don’t even have the two rack units of disk arrays I bought at auction powered up yet because they need 240V which I don’t have handy. I guess someone could do the math on what 48 enterprise SAS drives will pull if they need to satisfy their curiosity, I’m not sure I want to. I will hook them up someday but for now ignorance is bliss. All I know is it’s a lot, and there’s stuff I’m not even including in this.
Dell T320 idles out at 54–99W, but typical use would be in the 101–158W range. In my locale, one Dell T320 will cost about $35 USD per month to run. I shut them down before retiring for the evening as I couldn’t justify running them while I’m sawing logs. I’m the only user and I have no late nite/early morning Linux ISOs downloads scheduled.
Mine idles at 35w. It’s running OpenMediaVault on a Ryzen 5 3400g w/ 16GB ram, 3 HDDs, 1 SSD, 1 NVME.
It doesn’t really get above 45w even with a few torrents actively seeding. Aside from qBittorrent all my other containers are pretty much idle unless I access the services (Kavita, Flatnotes, FreshRSS, RecipeSage).
How do you like OMV? I’m about to redo my media storage to consolidate some services into a single host and it looks promising, but the amount of padding they felt they needed for their “Features” list gave me… pause.
It’s from their website, but the main index page, not the
/featurespage. It’s only the first half of the list on the index, but most of the items that I consider reaches (like listing “debian-based” and “debian package management” as separate top-line items) were in the first half.
Not op, I’ve been using it for years, it’s been super stable.
If you switch to the proxmox kernel (very easy with the add-ons), you can use ZFS.
I don’t love the docker containers interface, but it works.
Lol yeah, that’s something.
"Features:
- Exists."
It’s the first and only server OS I’ve used and I have no complaints.
Bear in mind I’m just using it for the containers I listed above plus media storage and backups. None of my services are accessible outside my network so I haven’t had to deal with any networking stuff at all.
About 220W on average with peaks around 280W. I’ve got 8 Optiplex micro PCs, 5 upcycled thin clients running smaller services, fiber ONT, another micro Optiplex as a router, a storage server, main switch, and a 5 port PoE switch for my 4 access points around the house.
Before I downsized everything to the USFF PCs, I was running 3 old enterprise rack servers that were about 220W each.
It’s currently running from solar from about 7am to 4pm with my small solar setup, but I’m in the process of installing a whole house PV system.
Yeah, I’m feeling the pain from my old enterprise gear but moving away from it has been hard. Right now I have an old 720XD for storage (12, 6tb spinning rust, 2 smaller SSDs for cache), an old Intel server with shitloads of RAM, an old R610 (at this point it’s only there for a service or two that I could surely migrate), a couple old HP MicroServer gen8’s, and an old HP SFF desktop. There are months my power bill looks like a mortgage.
I feel that.
Before I downsized, I was running 3x HP DL360 G6’s with dual Xenons and 96 GB RAM each. Way overkill for my needs but I got them cheap. Unfortunately, they and my air conditioner competed to see who could use the most electricity each month. 😆
The only thing I really lost in the scale down was the ability to spin up dev/test VMs for every little purpose. I’ve mostly just started using Docker containers for things like build environments.
The one with shitloads of RAM has 768GB and a pair of Xenons… My default VM gets more RAM than my desktop, but it’s great for the rare occasion I need a big-ass ramdisk or something. I was going to build a small jbod and get a couple USFF systems (possibly thin clients) to host my docker containers… Then disk prices went through the roof.
Ugh, yeah. My “temporary” spinners that were an emergency upgrade became permanent when I went to buy the new ones and prices had skyrocketed. I’ve got one cold spare left, so hopefully there’s a price break in the near-ish future
Optiplex
How’s that working for you? I don’t need 8 of them but after doing some passive research, the Optiplex seems to be a favorite in the homelab/selfhosting arena.
I personally have a better experience with the lenovo tiny, but I have a mix of tiny/mini/micro, and all of then make for a great low wattage server solution IMO.
They’re super common in corporate deployments, some larger companies will just give old (3-5 ish years) boxes away to employees when they do upgrades. I don’t have any running right now but I’ve gotten a few over the years that way. IMO their main virtue is that they’re easy to come by for cheap, but I don’t think I would seek one out specifically.
Not op, but they are great little machines if you don’t need a GPU. I have 2 as proxmox nodes and I want one more so I can have my more critical services running on it instead of my main docker machine.
Their Intel graphics work great for transcoding, but yeah, not much else. I’ve got Emby one one of them, and the QuickSync hardware acceleration works well even with multiple simultaneous streams.
Works pretty great as long as you keep your expectations realistic. Easy to upgrade and pretty reliable. Only annoying thing with any of those micro PCs is the cable management is a pain because of the power bricks. I got some USB-C PD adapters and Dell-style cables and that’s made a huge improvement.
