I am smarting up my home with lots of ZigBee thingies and decided to add a ZigBee smart monitor to my selfhost setup.
Its a desktop box with a core i7 9th gen, 48gb ram, no monitor.
I used to have 4xSSD 4TB + 2xHDD 6TB. Three RAID1 for a total of 4+4+6=14Tbs.
Power was sitting at 50W.
I restructured my storage: 1 RAID5 with the 4 SSDs (12tb) and removed the 2 HDDs.
Power went down to 38W!
I am amazed.
In the future will run just 1 hdd for storing backups and keep it spinned down 99% of the time.
PS: the above wattage is during transcoding, so with high CPU and disk usage…
You’ve saved a whoopping 0.3kWh/day (assuming transcoding 24/7), that’s surprisingly little I would say.
It’s still a 24% power save. In small numbers it doesn’t look like much, but over the course of a year, it adds up.
Sure it’s 100kWh in a year, so it’s a few bucks per month saved. But in reality it’s likely even less than half that saved, because the majority of the time it’s probably not under transcoding loads.
At 0.25€/kWh thats 27€ a year.
Not bad, I mean if he’s transcoding 24/7!
I am not LOL… But good point.
Power costs vary a lot around the world, depending on where OP lives every little saving can help.
Constantly turning it on/off will probably kill the disk faster than the power savings can make up for it, compared to just having it idle when not actively used.
Consumer harddisks are made to be spinned up and down occasionally. Don’t do it every five minutes… But I’ve been doing it for years and years with my server that spins up the disks once or twice a day, once I access some of my archived files. And it’s perfectly fine.
The hdd spin on once every night for backup, then off after a bit by the timeout.
That should not be a critical issue.
Yeah, most PCs get turned on and off like once per day. For example at most offices or at home. That’s perfectly within normal use.
I was impressed that HDDs where drawing so much, compared to overall CPU usage…
And its over 20% saving.
Yes, pennies, but nevertheless interesting.
My energy cost is about 0.6€/kWh, so not trivial, but I actually run it on PV, so not really a money factor, more an energy efficient consideration.
Yeah, don’t let the bashers get you down: wasting stuff just because it’s cheap is how we got here. Measuring your power use is the only way to make informed choices, and sometimes the results are surprising.
Like, I was surprised to find that my audio gear uses exactly the same power whether it’s playing or not. The subwoofer alone uses twice as much power as the RPi that feeds it signal. It’s maybe 0.02 USD/day (for the sub), but I’ve got extra smart plugs from a multi-pack, and it’s easy enough to put together an automation to power them all down if they’ve been idle a while.
wasting stuff just because it’s cheap is how we got here
Not really, at least if we’re talking about electricity use.
We got here by expanding our standard of living. Most residential electricity use is heating, cooling, and other major appliances, and we’re not going to make up for that by cutting a few watts here and there.
Don’t get me wrong, I’m absolutely in favor of small wins, but it’s important to not miss the forest for the trees. For example, don’t throw out good hardware just to save a few watts. If your goal is to help with climate change, there are much better ways to spend your time than cutting a few watts here and there.
Fair enough. But even if you don’t run on PV and actually do transcode 24/7/365, it’s still only 5€/month. They idle at around 1/3 to 1/2 that though, which is arguably better for the disk than being turned on/off all the time, so you still get the bulk of the savings while extending disk lifetime.
And here I am with a 5 server cluster, 2x custom servers running opnsense for redundancy (8gbps internet connection needs real horsepower for IDS/firewall/routing), and a 36 bay storage truenas node… that’s getting upgraded to 72 bay version for more drives (34 additional drives ready for install RIGHT NOW)… I see your 50 and 38 W… and raise you
This
2200-ish watts? Oh… and cooling the servers to keep them to about 75 degrees intake temp.
So really closer to 3400 watts.
Taking your numbers of 6 watts saved per drive would only save me 180w currently and 432w after I install the additional 32 drives next week. I’d still be in the 3kW territory.
…
I also have solar…
I generate (orange) enough to export (purple) a little during the day… but that’s about it… Battery (light green) usage just kills peak hours.
The electrical usage costs me about $100-110 a month in electricity after solar ($0.06 per kWh), probably closer to $150 if solar wasn’t eating up a bunch of it. Less than subscriptions to all the shit that I’m hosting for myself by a long long shot. Forget the family and other users.
More information... Not even remotely necessary to read.
Nextcloud - 5TB, google drive is $10/mo for 2TB
MSTY - AI stuff, another $10/mo subscription if you want google gemini. $20 for ChatGPT. Minecraft - private, $5 a month minimum. Probably closer to $10 for reasonable specs to do anything with the kiddos.
Email - 1TB across all users right now, ~$5 minimum for just me, though I’m oversize for many platforms as I have everything going back to 2006 or so. So probably close to $8-10 for just me.
Private search aggregator - apparently a paid service now with the likes of kagi. $10
Home assistant - $6.50 through nobucasa.
$46-66 on this stuff alone…Frigate… 8 cameras with corals for inferencing. God know what that cost would be. I keep 30 days of 24 hours, 6 months of detected items and 1 year of snapshots. I’m at 50TB of usage there. This probably could/should be cut down significantly, at least halved. but even 25TB is a fuck-ton of money per month on any VPS/hosted system. Ring’s plan is about half what I’m doing at $20/mo. No idea what other services would end up being. Not even sure how ring and other make money at that cost when storage is expensive otherwise.
Paperless-ngx, lubelog, grocy, gramps for organization/documentation would need a VPS service… or migrating to a non-hosted solution (so can’t really be shared easily, or shared through google docs sort of thing).
Self-hosted things like lemmy, mastodon, matrix, peertube, etc… VPS costs would be something substantial as well. And business operation stuff like my invoices, jump hosts, secure vms, etc…
And lastly, the cost of owning my own data… where no company can spy on me. Or monetize me in ads. Invidious, my own dns with custom rules for me vs the kids, etc…etc…etc… Priceless.
Then multiply the parts of the list for other users on my system (wife, both kids, father, etc…)
And of course the massive porn collection… Gotta have that on a moments notice.
Thank you, very insightful.
That’s a lot of power. Consider where I live having 3kWh for domestic use is standard. I have 6kWh due to the PV, and its highly unusual.
Also, at my energy costs that would be ridiculously expensive, and way out of any justification, PV or not PV.
Even only sustain 3kWh just for self host would be madness. And the cost would be unsustainable as well.
The point that you “save” on the various subscription is moot, IMO, as those would never be subscribed in the first place at my house, so the “saving” is purely a luxury justification.
No, for domestic use only that is pure madness. I admire, and envy, you a lot… don’t get me wrong, but that just prove you want / can splurge on fancy toys ad much as if you purchased a huge SUV just to go grocery shopping.
Most of the hardware itself was free(business decommissioned) or auction wins (4.5TB of ram out of a $600 auction, selling some servers paid the whole auction off). So quite cheap in that respect. And it’s not strictly private use. Lots of functions in there to keep my business going/make it easier to track taxes/auto billing clients/email/etc. Though only typically operationally, not as an income generator itself (eg, not hosting other companies stuff so much).
And yeah, if energy was 10x more expensive (I think it was you or someone else that said $0.60 per kWh?) I’d probably rethink my situation/stance a bit.
But 3kW service is awfully low. Standard around here is 200amp service to a house (at 120v, so 24kVA service), 100amp (12kVA) if you have gas utilities handling range/heating, as A/C is heavily required where I live. My PV setup is rated 15.9kW, though caps out at 11kW on the best days. I can’t imagine living off of 3kW. My desktop uses 1/10th of that. My idle usage in my house minus the servers is ~2kW. I can see why you’re squeezing Watts. Some googling shows Italy being a country that does this… You probably are in similar situation as them where A/C isn’t really common, heating and cooking isn’t electric based, etc… Most of the year I’m not allowed to even make a fire, so I’m forced to rely on electricity.
But no SUV here… 1 hybrid sedan for this family of 4. Gas costs too much and we drive too little.
I missed the business part… That make absolutely sense and gives out a different prospect. Here, you would be able to write off taxes all your home rig expenses I think.
Yes, factoring in all energy costs (including the public television tax which is part of your utility bills) energy cost me 60€c per kWh.
We use gas extensively, but for heating I use wood pellets with an idro-stove (heats the water that then circulate in the heaters).
In summer I can use ac for those nights that doesn’t cool off, but during the day having 50cm thick stone walls never heats up enough inside. Winter are a different story, heating is on from 1 October to 1 of may, and here Home Assistant with per-room ZigBee thermostats and thermovalves is helping a lot to keep the pellet usage down to 2x15kg bags per day when its below freezing outside in daytime.
Until we upgraded from 3kWh to 6kWh (at nice 300€ price point) we frequently had the power disconnected because the oven was on while drying hairs… Or washer and toaster… What a fun ride.
3kWh is actually enough only for a condo, not for a house, but still it’s how it works here.
All my hardware is refurbished from work, got it from surplus or things going to be dismissed. And way overpowered for the services I run (full arr stack, Usenet and torrents, WebDAV and filebrowser sharing, navidrome jellyfin actual budget homepage romm radicale and stuff I surely forgot).
I even have two ISPs for redundancy because living in the woods make it unreliable, so FWA (5G 300mbps but capped) and FTTC (20 shitty mbps but uncapoed) it is.
