Selfhosters what is the power draw of your entire setup? And have you done anything special to manage it you’d like to share?
Including all network equipment I use around 110kWh of good ol’ 120V 60Hz USA juice per month. Averaging about 215 watts of power draw for my systems. Nothing amazing, but I like to think that it’s a conservative setup for everything I accomplish with it. I’m paying around $25 a month for my setup. None of that includes my work PC or personal PC, just hosting infrastructure.
Other than trying to make sure all power states are available on my server I haven’t done a lot of power conservation.
I’m curious what you all have.
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
Like 3-12w but I’m only running a little mostly jellyfin server
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.
Nice
What hardware are you running?
11th gen i3 NUC, headless Debian.
3 Lenovo Tiny’s, one HP Mini, 3 external drives, a switch and 2 modems runs just under 100W.
I worked good out a whole ago, so here’s a copy and paste:
I have a power monitoring plug on this setup, so I can tell you exactly how much!
CPU: Intel® Xeon® CPU E5-2680 v4 @ 2.40GHz
RAM: 512 GiB DDR4 Multi-bit ECCMy disk layout is like so:

This draws a fairly consistent 650W, including a POE router (15.6kwh per day). My current electricity price is 39.38c/kwh… HOWEVER I have a cheap rate of 8c/kwh between midnight and 6:00am, and free power between 11:00am and 2:00pm. I also have solar which tends to cover ~10:00am to ~2:00pm, but its dependant on sunlight so I’ll ignore it for now.
So:
12:00am-06:00am = ($0.0800/kwh * 0.65kw) * 06 = $0.312
06:00am-11:00am = ($0.3938/kwh * 0.65kw) * 05 = $1.279
11:00am-02:00pm = ($0.0000/kwh * 0.65kw) * 03 = $0.000
02:00pm-12:00am = ($0.3938/kwh * 0.65kw) * 10 = $2.559Total = $4.15AUD per 24 hours, or $1,514.75AUD per year
My Merross plug is showing that I’m currently averaging a daily consumpion of 15.021kwh, and I’m not accounting for the hours of solar offset so the actual dollar value will be a little lower. But still. Fair few bucks.
1,514.75AUD per year
What apps are you running?
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.
My servers (3U) in the DC pull ~400w but my provider doesn’t do power/traffic billing just a flat fee ~230€ For my homelab if I power up my backup server pull a backup and then write it to tape and my gf is gaming it’s 900w Idle is like 150w
About 80 W. I do Folding@Home
Something like 25W at idle for the single server I operate. I’m not counting networking because I’m using the equipment that I already have and need just to distribute internet at home.
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.
Around 400W, including switches and access points.
Usually around 205 W from the wall to UPS and 155 W used by devices connected to the UPS.
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.
Wow, off grid and you pull that much.
Impressive.
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”
All these people saying 500, 600, 700+ watts - it’s almost hard to believe. My “gaming” computer, with two monitors, peaks around 400W on graphics-heavy games, and the monitors are like 120 of that. I suppose, though, if you’re running a server-class CPU, a half dozen HDDs, and a GPU for continuous transcoding or mining, the it wouldn’t be too hard to get there.
I run a dozen containers on an N100 with a couple of HDDs, VOIP device, router & cable modem on 63W, and I’ve considered that a pretty fair deal for a home lab. Of course, that only serves the household - nothing really offered to the public.
I mean, my phone charges at 60W. Granted, it’s not charging 24/7 but 50W is pretty good indeed.
My server is a OnePlus5T running Post marketOS. It runs AdGuardHime, a Static Website, nginx, and Anubis.









