• enbyecho@lemmy.world
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    9
    ·
    6 months ago

    Residential electricity isn’t cheap

    This is a point many folks don’t take into account. My average per Kwh cost right now is $0.41 (yes, California, yay). So it costs me almost $400 per year just to have some older hardware running 24x7

    • dan@upvote.au
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      3
      ·
      edit-2
      5 months ago

      I solved this by installing solar panels. They produce more electricity than I need (enough to cover charging an EV in when I get one in the future), and I should break even (in terms of cost) within 5-6 years of installation. Had them installed last year under NEM 2.0.

      I know PG&E want to introduce a fixed monthly fee at some point, which throws off my break-even calculations a bit.

      Some VPS providers have good deals and you can often find systems with 16GB RAM and NVMe drives for around $70-100/year during LowEndTalk Black Friday sales, so it’s definitely worth considering if your use cases can be better handled by a VPS. I have both - a home server for things like photos, music, and security camera footage, and VPSes for things that need to be reliable and up 100% of the time (websites, email, etc)

    • mal3oon@lemmy.world
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      2
      arrow-down
      1
      ·
      6 months ago

      This sounds excessive, that’s almost 1.1$/day, amounting to more than 2kWh/24hrs, ie ~80W/hr? You will need to invest in a TDP friendly build. I’m running a AMD APU (known for shitty idle consumption) with Raid 5 and still hover less than 40W/h.

      • enbyecho@lemmy.world
        link
        fedilink
        English
        arrow-up
        3
        ·
        5 months ago

        This sounds excessive, that’s almost 1.1$/day, amounting to more than 2kWh/24hrs, ie ~80W/hr? You will need to invest in a TDP friendly build. I’m running a AMD APU (known for shitty idle consumption) with Raid 5 and still hover less than 40W/h.

        This isn’t speculation on my part, I measured the consumption with a Kill-a-watt. It’s an 11 year old PC with 4 hard drives and multiple fans because it’s in a hot environment and hard drive usage is significant because it’s running security camera software in a virtual machine. Host OS is Linux MInt. It averages right around 110w. I’m fully aware that’s very high relative to something purpose built.

        You will need to invest in a TDP friendly build

        Right, and spend even more money.

        • mal3oon@lemmy.world
          link
          fedilink
          English
          arrow-up
          2
          ·
          5 months ago

          I think the main culprit is CPU/MB, so that’s the only thing needed a replacement. Many cheap alternatives (less than 200$) that can half the consumption and would pay itself in a year of usage easily. There is a Google doc floating around listing all the efficient CPUs and their TDPs. Just a suggestion, I’m pretty sure after a year it would payoff its price, there is absolutely no need for a 110w/h unless you’re running LLMs on that and even then it shouldn’t be that high.

    • Valmond@lemmy.world
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      1
      ·
      5 months ago

      Omg, I pay 30€ for 1Gb/0.7Gb (ten more for symmetrical 10Gb, I don’t need it and can’t even use more than 1Gb/s but my inner nerd wants it) and 0.15€/KWh.

      BTW the electricity cost is somewhat or totally negated when you heat your apartment/house depending on your heating system. For me in the winter I totally write it off.