I'm designing around an Intel N150, and this thread is the reason. These chips idle in single digits with an SSD, so most of the cost of running always-on goes away. The catch is the 16GB RAM ceiling on most boards, which caps how much local AI you can run on it. For the low-watt folks: what did you give up to get there, and was it worth it?

I can't believe I'm the lowest power draw at 50w. I thought that was pretty high.

That includes all my network hardware, my NAS, and my server. Basically everything that is "always on"

Way too damn much, around 700w between 4 rack servers and associated gear

7 or 8w idle for the server. Comes to about 10eur per year. I couldn't justify using more without feeling like a hypocrite who also advocates for energy conservation.

NAS sits at 24w idle. Security cams are drawing 19w of poe power, but I suspect there is a bit more being used in total. I have another NUC using probably around 24w max.

I'll slap some power meters on the switches and main nuc and try get some more accurate numbers.

65W for

• two Lenovo tiny proxmox nodes, each with nvme + SATA SSD + second NIC
• two switches (5/8 port)
• PCengine APU running OpnSense
• Raspi4 with Zigbee antenna
• Mini PC + JBOD (4 SSD in total)
• Small OpenDTU device

Keeping power consumption low was my design goal, but I eventually added the secondary NICs and additional switch for Proxmox replication and management traffic.

My server is a OnePlus5T running Post marketOS. It runs AdGuardHime, a Static Website, nginx, and Anubis.

My NAS/home server takes about 180 kWH/year, or 20W on average (costs me about 5 Euro/month). This feels like a lot to me and makes up a good chunk of my total energy usage.

What I did to optimize it is mostly select a "low-power" x86 platform, and limit the number of disks. I also decided not to use TrueNAS because it couldn't let the disks from going to sleep.

The machine hosts 10 TB of usable storage (+RAID 1), syncthing, immich, file server, Influx DB, Grafana, and a few other services.

~500 watts continuous.

Around 90 Watts for modem, server (which includes router VM), network switch and access point. It runs on solar most of the time

I’m drawing 4.474kWh per day on average, and drew 139 kWh over the last month.

I have EcoFlow batteries on both A and B PDUs.

Stuff that can be powered off (mining, redundant power supplies) gets the wall outlet feeding ups b and pdu B turned off at 4pm and turned back on at 9pm to align with my time of use rate plan.

My empire of dirt is basically nothing. I'm using low powered computers, mostly fanless. The watt meter on the main power bar is like 15W.

homelab running linux mint with about 60 docker containers about 45w, meassured at the socket (2HDD)

About 300-400 watts. I should put it on a smart plug to track it over time. I have a NAS with 16 HDDs, an outdated super overkill switch that I should replace to save some power, and a few old laptops.

It also might use some more power while transcoding for my PeerTube Instance or Jellyfin, and I have my desktop set up as a remote runner for the PeerTube Instance, so that uses some additional power.

Around 1000-1200 watt continuously. Still our electricity cost is less then 0.

Anyway my old 11gen dell power edge servers cause the biggest power draw. But I am not ready to upgrade them due to the current memory shortage.

5 w for the machine. I think the router is 20w.

Around 700W on low load, almost idle. Haven't had the chance to test it at full load yet.

It sits in my basement, so the waste heat is actually useful this time of year. Even more so when my basement would otherwise be freezing.

I plan on implementing scheduling where the two most power hungry servers are powered down and up as needed. The other two take almost nothing.

Also, the UPS supports a green mode that is a lot more efficient but with a downside of output side dropping out a few ms during switchover. This removes any conversion loss. I haven't tested whether my hardware can tolerate it yet, so for now I'm living with the conversion loss.

My house is powered by cheap hydroelectric supply, generated in a mountain roughly 5km from my house, so I'm not worried.

Too much.

38watts and spikes to 65watts from my Synology. My gaming laptop turn proxmox can spike to 350watts but normally sits at 50-75watts.

90w here, so 65kwh/mo. Tinyminimicro server. Three pi (5, 4, 3B), fiber gateway, Mikrotik router, switch and two APs. Plus power gear (managed PDU and UPS).

Averages 50-70 watts. Includes my main NUC NAS thing and all of my networking equipment.

Currently, 2 servers and 2 3d printers, I'm running just over 200w at idle. Depending on what my printers and servers are doing at any given moment, it could go up to 2000w, total, but I haven't seen that high a power draw since I stopped contributing to Boinc projects about a year ago. I remember finding it mildly amusing that my graphics cards had a higher power draw then my printers.

My budget is under 100w for 3 servers with a combined 18tb of ssd and 28tb of spinning rust that stays spun down unless I need to so a cold backup.

Used to be 200watts bang on but the latest round of updates bumped it up to 210Watts. Everything is on a UPS and I pull measurements from that into an RRD DB (because I like to make my own stuff). It's kinda cool to see how heavy disk use or CPU intense tasks will increase power draw by up to 50W, or some times or when the power drops off sharply I know my NVR container is not working because 6 ffmpeg tasks all stopped at the same time.

• 1x T330 with 4 disks and 2 dozen services.
• 1x H340 NAS with 2 disks
• 1x PoE switch
• 3x PoE cameras
• 2x Desktop switches
• 1x Desktop router
• 1x Cable Modem

On average it's about 4kwh per day. I'm effectively off grid most of the time so the cost of electricity is irrelevant unless I go way overboard during a week of rain or something and I have to draw from the grid.

I am about to move from an 18ru rack to 45.. So.. Might be some expansion in the future.

Mine draws around 15-20 watts. I'm mostly using low-power hardware: a Rock 5b as my main server, a 2tb nvme ssd, a 2tb hdd and a Glinet travel router (fine since i live in an apartment).

My nas takes about 40 Wh. And my network machine (proxmox + openwrt) about 20 Wh. When I upgraded my nas a year ago it was actually drawing twice as much, I have since then switched to more efficient processor (amd from normal to E) and I took out graphic card that I didn't use. I could have in theory merge those two, but I wanted to separate networking from nas+apps. I don't know how much my smart devices take but I don't have many so it can be up to 50 Wh total maybe. But that is more smart home than self hosting 😀

Most of my stuff lives on a cheap hetzner vps so that power is someone else's problem lol. at home it's a raspberry pi that's always on (a few watts) and a bitaxe miner doing about 19W, that's around 14 kWh a month, like 3 euros here. the gaming pc is the only hungry thing and it stays off, the pi wakes it with wake-on-lan when I actually need it. took me a while to get the bios settings right (erp off, power on by pci-e) but it was worth it.

late but i think i lose the thread. The entire house runs at slightly over 1.5kW, and self hosted equipment accounts around 1.2kW of that. The daily cost is only about £2 though due to solarand batteries.

About 230w at idle with 3 servers, 2 routers, switch with PoE for umpteen devices, 16 spinning hdds.

~500W continuous, ~625W peak. To reduce this further I'd really need to start consolidating hardware. I do have one system that could be replaced with something more modern and would probably drop 20-30W. And my fileserver is a bit overkill as well so there could be improvements there.

About 80 W. I do Folding@Home

I am using a Raspbery Pi 5 8GB as my NAS & homeserver. It is quick and performant enough while having an idle power draw which is not really noticeable on your electricity bill. Very happy with it.

Around 300wh.

• router
• sw with 4 poe cams
• 2 minipcs as servers
• pc used as nas with truenas

Around 150W for UPS, Mikrotik router, Pi 4, Proxmox/TrueNAS server with 8x SAS drives. Without the SAS drives I'd be closer to 50W, but how else am I going to heat up my cupboard? I got the SAS drives at a bargain price thankfully... I estimate about AUD300/year in electricity.

i3-4160 running Proxmox (OPNSense VM and a couple of containers) with 3 spinny drives and no GPU, TP-Link 8x GbE switch, ASUS AX1800 as a Wifi AP, ISP's own manky cable modem, plus a UPS eats about 66-72 watts at the wall socket. If I install a passively cooled GT-710 for transcoding, it adds 10-15 watts at idle.

If I fire up everything in the rack it's several kilowatts. Probably more than a 230 V wall socket can handle.

Usually it's way less, though right now it's just a switch and the router/firewall, mere 57 W.

I make most of my own net power with solar PV, soon 4 kWp in total.

When nothing (no a/c, washer, work PCs off, etc) is running my house power draw is about 500-800w. So my battery keeps things going until the next day.

Edit: just checked and whole house is 350W this evening.

NAS running ~15 docker (frigate, nextcloud, immich, plex etc), two windows VMs one is managing my NAS backups to cloud.

Couple RPIs one does Home assistant, one does pihole and weewx.

All my Network gear, and poe for APs and a few of my cameras,

2 x 12 channel whole house amps fed by 11 Chromecast audios (that's going to be a disaster one day)

That "idles" just under 300w but can obviously jump all over.

Rest of my security cameras are poe from another location (since I couldn't get the network drops back to the server room for the majority of the cameras, uses another 65w , but that's a bit misleading as it is picking up other things since it's not as isolated.