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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  • nightmareFluffy@alien.topBEnglish
    1·
    11 months ago

    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.

  • hifidood@alien.topBEnglish
    1·
    11 months ago

    It’s crazy how cheap power is some places. Paying upwards of $0.42 USD a Kwh here in Southern California.

    • SamSausages@alien.topBEnglish
      1·
      11 months ago

      and a big part of the reason is taxes and regulations. People with $$ don’t care, but everyone in the bottom 75% really takes a big hit compared to their income.

  • phidauex@alien.topBEnglish
    1·
    11 months ago

    Nice work! Studies have shown many times that visibility into ones energy usage is the most helpful tool in reducing energy usage. You can’t adjust effectively if you have to wait a month to see the results, being able to monitor energy live lets you make realtime tweaks to see what works.

    My homelab has been running at about 90W for a long time, but had gotten up to 150W after adding an HPE ML30 and a new switch. I’m now about to retire one host (should have an Optiplex 3060 Micro for sale soon…), combining two POE switches, and hoping to get back down to at least 100W.

  • throwdroptwo@alien.topBEnglish
    1·
    11 months ago

    All these changes were in the name of almost reducing up to $250 a month on the electric bill.

    How long till you see a return on this investment?

    3 years? 6 years? 20 years? Yea that is the essence of door-to-door solar panel install scams.

  • Hairless_Human@alien.topBEnglish
    1·
    11 months ago

    Jeez you guys are paying so much for power! I pay $0.10 kwh so power costs for me is of no concern. I just let my servers sip away.

  • cylemmulo@alien.topBEnglish
    1·
    11 months ago

    This is the way. As cool as enterprise servers are it’s nice to have a setup where my servers are 1/10th the size, and power consumption, as well as have more compute.