I wonder if my system is good or bad. My server needs 0.1kWh.
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Around 18-20 Watts on idle. It can go up to about 40 W at 100% load.
I have a Intel N100, I’m really happy about performance per watt, to be honest.
kWh is a unit of energy, not power
I was really confused by that and that the decided units weren’t just in W (0.1 kW is pretty weird even)
Wh shouldn’t even exist tbh, we should use Joules, less confusing
At least in the US, the electric company charges in kWh, computer parts are advertised in terms of watts, and batteries tend to be in amp hours, which is easy to convert to watt hours.
Joules just overcomplicates things.
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Do you regularly divide/multiply by 3600? That’s not something I typically do in my head, and there’s no reason to do it when everything is denominated in watts. What exactly is the benefit?
Wow, the US education system must be improved.
I pay my electric bill by the kWh too, and I don’t live in the US. When it comes to household and EV energy consumption, kWh is the unit of choice.
1J is 3600Wh.
No, if you’re going to lecture people on this, at least be right about facts. 1W is 1J/s. So multiply by an hour and you get 1Wh = 3600J
That’s literraly the same thing,
It’s not literally the same thing. The two units are linearly proportional to each other, but they’re not the same. If they were the same, then this discussion would be rather silly.
but the name is less confusing because people tend to confuse W and Wh
Finally, something I can agree with. But that’s only because physics is so undervalued in most educational systems.
I did a physics degree and am comfortable with Joules, but in the context of electricity bills, kWh makes more sense.
All appliances are advertised in terms of their Watt power draw, so estimating their daily impact on my bill is as simple as multiplying their kW draw by the number of hours in a day I expect to run the thing (multiplied by the cost per kWh by the utility company of course).
Watt hours makes sense to me. A watt hour is just a watt draw that runs for an hour, it’s right in the name.
Maybe you’ve just whooooshed me or something, I’ve never looked into Joules or why they’re better/worse.
Joules (J) are the official unit of energy. 1W=1J/s. That means 1Wh=3600J or that 1J is kinda like “1 Watt second”. You’re right that Wh is easier since everything is rated in Watts and it would be insane to measure energy consumption by seconds. Imagine getting your electric bill and it says you’ve used 3,157,200,000J.
3,157,200,000J
Or just 3.1572GJ.
Which apparently is how this Canadian natural gas company bills its customers: https://www.fortisbc.com/about-us/facilities-operations-and-energy-information/how-gas-is-measured
I guess it wouldn’t make sense to measure energy used by gas-powered appliances in Wh since they’re not rated in Watts. Still, measuring volume and then converting to energy seems unnecessarily complicated.
Thanks for the explainer, that makes a lot of sense.
Wasn’t it stated for the usage during November? 60kWh for november. Seems logic to me.
Edit: forget it, he’s saying his server needs 0.1kWh which is bonkers ofc
Only one person here has posted its usage for November. The OP has not talked about November or any timeframe.
Yeah misxed up pists, thought one depended on another because it was under it. Again forget my post :-)
I think at max 200w? It runs a collection of fedi/self service stuff.
I also run a pi with a couple of apps on a pi 3 that sips power.
It’s a legitimate issue because it’s 50+ cents per killowat hour where I live so power is very expensive…
that’s insane, i pay like 5¢ a KWh
Want to switch?
That seems really high, I think power where I live is about 12-14 cents per kilowatt hour. What makes it so expenses where you live?
Mostly just that they can. It’s more expensive per tier actually.
https://www.pge.com/assets/pge/docs/account/rate-plans/residential-electric-rate-plan-pricing.pdf
Take a look, this is the old pricing. They just voted to up it again.
There’s legislation that is moving along to charge people with solar because…idk.
They’re charging for solar because PGE is a greedy fuck.
Yes. There was talk locally for local government to take control of the power but it’s just talk…
It gets over 110 where I live in the summer…so air conditioning can make it very expensive.
Wait this is in the US? How, this is even more expensive than Hawaii, and they have obvious reasons for power to be more expensive there
PGE serves Northern California. They keep raising rates like 10-15% each year to cover their losses after all the wildfires a couple years ago and because of the greed.
Take note, folks. Watch this trend spread.
Yep. And they are talking about a couple more price hikes next year. Significant ones.
0.50 $/kWh is a normal price in Europe now
Damn, I wish ours was that cheap. We’re roughly $.30/kwh, mostly because our local poco is a reseller of SCE and we’re in a rural area.
Holy shit. I’m paying less than 10c per kwh even in the “high usage” tier.
I wish that was ours…
My whole setup including 2 PIs and one fully speced out AM4 system with 100TB of drives a Intel Arc and 4x 32gb ecc ram uses between 280W - 420W I live in Germany and pay 25ct per KWh and my whole apartment uses 600w at any given time and approximately 15kwh per day 😭
50W-ish idle? Ryzen 1700, 2 HDDs, and a GTX 750ti. My next upgrade will hopefully cut this in half.
17W for an N100 system with 4 HDD’s
That’s pretty low with 4 HDD’s. One of my servers use 30 watts. Half of that is from the 2 HDD’s in it.
@meldrik @qaz I’ve got a bunch of older, smaller drives, and as they fail I’m slowly transitioning to much more efficient (and larger) HGST helium drives. I don’t have measurements, but anecdotally a dual-drive USB dock with crappy 1.5A power adapter (so 18W) couldn’t handle spinning up two older drives but could handle two HGST drives.
Which HDDs? That’s really good.
Seagate Ironwolf “ST4000VN006”
I do have some issues with read speeds but that’s probably networking related or due to using RAID5.
Is there a (Linux) command I can run to check my power consumption?
If you have a laptop/something that runs off a battery,
upowerIf you have a server with out-of-band/lights-out management such as iDRAC (Dell), iLO (HPe), IPMI (generic, Supermicro, and others) or equivalent, those can measure the server’s power draw at both PSUs and total.
Get a Kill-a-Watt meter.
Or smart sockets. I got multiple of them (ZigBee ones), they are precise enough for most uses.
80-110W
I came here to tell my tiny Raspberry pi 4 consumes ~10 watt, But then after noticing the home server setup of some people and the associated power consumption, I feel like a child in a crowd of adults 😀
we’re in the same boat, but it does the job and stays under 45°C even under load, so I’m not complaining
I have an old desktop downclocked that pulls ~100W that I’m using as a file server, but I’m working on moving most of my services over to an Intel NUC that pulls ~15W. Nothing wrong with being power efficient.
Quite the opposite. Look at what they need to get a fraction of what you do.
Or use the old quote, “they’re compensating for small pp”
I’m using an old laptop with the lid closed. Uses 10w.
All in, including my router, switches, modem, laptop, and NAS, I’m using 50watts +/- 5.
It does everything I need, and I feel like that’s pretty efficient.
The PC I’m using as a little NAS usually draws around 75 watt. My jellyfin and general home server draws about 50 watt while idle but can jump up to 150 watt. Most of the components are very old. I know I could get the power usage down significantly by using newer components, but not sure if the electricity use outweighs the cost of sending them to the landfill and creating demand for more newer components to be manufactured.
For the whole month of November. 60kWh. This is for all my servers and network equipment. On average, it draws around 90 watt.
How you measuring this? Looks very neat.
Looks like home assistant
Shelly plug, integrated into Home Assistant.
Idles at around 24W. It’s amazing that your server only needs .1kWh once and keeps on working. You should get some physicists to take a look at it, you might just have found perpetual motion.
.1kWh is 100Wh
I ate sushi today.
Good point. Now it does make sense. I know the secret to the perpetual motion machine now.
This is a factual but irrelevant statement
Running an old 7th gen Intel, It has a 2070 and a 1080 in it, six mechanical hard drives 3 SSDs. Then I have an eighth gen laptop with a 1070 TI mobile. But the laptop’s a camera server so it’s always running balls to the wall. Running a unified dream machine pro, 24 port poe, 16 port poe and an 8 port poe
Because of the overall workload and the age of the CPU, it burns about 360 watts continuous.
I can save a few watts by putting the discs to sleep, But I’m in the camp where the spin up and spin down of the discs cost more wear than continuous running.
Edit: cleaned up the slaughter from the dictation, after I cleaned up my physical space from Christmas festivities.
My home rack draws around 3.5kW steady-state, but it also has more than 200 spinning disks
What are you hosting?
I think I would go over 10 kW if I fire up everything. Only obout 80 spinny plates of rust though.
My server rack has
- 3x Dell R730
- 1x Dell R720
- 2x Cisco Catalyst 3750x (IP Routing license)
- 2x Netgear M4300-12x12f
- 1x Unifi USW-48-Pro
- 1x USW-Agg
- 3x Framework 11th Gen (future cluster)
- 1x Protectli FE4B
All together that draws… 0.1 kWh… in 0.327s.
In real time terms, measured at the UPS, I have a running stable state load of 900-1100w depending on what I have at load. I call it my computationally efficient space heater because it generates more heat than is required for my apartment in winter except for the coldest of days. It has a dedicated 120v 15A circuit
Good lord, how much does electricity cost where you are? Combined with the air conditioning to keep the space livable, that would be prohibitively expensive for me
It’s always wild reading the power draw people wrote here.
I knew it was because this is a US & Europe centric site and many people from homelabs actually run Enterprise size rigs, but my 4 member household run on 2kW for the entire house lol and 75℅ of that is just A/C we use at night.
My household of 7 averages 900 watts year-round.
On cold winter days, we can average 6kW over 24h, but peak is more like 10 I’d 13. Not talking just about my space heaters with embedded computing power and TBs of storage, but the whole household.
Yeah it’s a bit of a chonk. I don’t remember the exact itemization on the power bill and I don’t have one in front of me.
