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I wonder if my system is good or bad. My server needs 0.1kWh.

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[–] [email protected] 2 points 37 minutes ago

With everything on, 100W but I don't have my NAS on all the time and in that case I pull only 13W since my server is a laptop

[–] [email protected] 1 points 41 minutes ago
[–] [email protected] 4 points 2 hours ago (1 children)

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 😀

[–] [email protected] 1 points 10 minutes ago

we're in the same boat, but it does the job and stays under 45°C even under load, so I'm not complaining

[–] [email protected] 16 points 8 hours ago

Mate, kWh is a measure of electricity volume, like gallons is to liquid. Also, 100 watt hours would be a much more sensical way to say the same thing. What you've said in the title is like saying your server uses 1 gallon of water. It's meaningless without a unit of time. Watts is a measure of current flow (pun intended), similar to a measurement like gallons per minute.

For example, if your server uses 100 watts for an hour it has used 100 watt hours of electricity. If your server uses 100 watts for 100 hours it has used 10000 watts of electricity, aka 10kwh.

My NAS uses about 60 watts at idle, and near 100w when it's working on something. I use an old laptop for a plex server, it probably uses like 50 watts at idle and like 150 or 200 when streaming a 4k movie, I haven't checked tbh. I did just acquire a BEEFY network switch that's going to use 120 watts 24/7 though, so that'll hurt the pocket book for sure. Soon all of my servers should be in the same place, with that network switch, so I'll know exactly how much power it's using.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 5 hours ago

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.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 5 hours ago* (last edited 1 hour ago)

Pulling around 200W on average.

  • 100W for the server. Xeon E3-1231v3 with 8 spinning disks + HBA, couple of sata SSD’s
  • ~80W for the unifi PoE 48 Pro switch. Most of this is PoE power for half a dozen cameras, downstream switches and AP’s, and a couple of raspberry pi’s
  • ~20W for protectli vault running Opnsense
  • Total usage measured via Eaton UPS
  • Subsidised during the day with solar power (Enphase)
  • Tracked in home assistant
[–] [email protected] 2 points 9 hours ago (1 children)

My home rack draws around 3.5kW steady-state, but it also has more than 200 spinning disks

[–] [email protected] 1 points 29 minutes ago

What are you hosting?

[–] [email protected] 5 points 12 hours ago (1 children)

For the whole month of November. 60kWh. This is for all my servers and network equipment. On average, it draws around 90 watt.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 8 hours ago (2 children)

How you measuring this? Looks very neat.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 41 minutes ago

Shelly plug, integrated into Home Assistant.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 5 hours ago

Looks like home assistant

[–] [email protected] 35 points 21 hours ago* (last edited 21 hours ago) (2 children)

kWh is a unit of energy, not power

[–] [email protected] 2 points 10 hours ago* (last edited 10 hours ago) (1 children)

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

[–] [email protected] 4 points 10 hours ago (1 children)

Only one person here has posted its usage for November. The OP has not talked about November or any timeframe.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 hour ago

Yeah misxed up pists, thought one depended on another because it was under it. Again forget my post :-)

[–] [email protected] 2 points 12 hours ago (1 children)

I was really confused by that and that the decided units weren't just in W (0.1 kW is pretty weird even)

[–] [email protected] 3 points 9 hours ago (2 children)

Wh shouldn't even exist tbh, we should use Joules, less confusing

[–] [email protected] 2 points 8 hours ago (2 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 4 hours ago (2 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 2 hours ago

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

[–] [email protected] 1 points 3 hours ago

Thanks for the explainer, that makes a lot of sense.

[–] [email protected] -1 points 8 hours ago (1 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 21 minutes ago* (last edited 17 minutes ago)

Wow, the US education system must be improved. 1J is 3600Wh. That's literraly the same thing, but the name is less confusing because people tend to confuse W and Wh

[–] [email protected] 23 points 20 hours ago (4 children)

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.

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[–] [email protected] 2 points 14 hours ago

I use unraid with 5950x and it wouldn't stop crashing until I disabled c states

So that plus 18 hdds and 2 ssds it sits at 200watts 24/7

[–] [email protected] 9 points 20 hours ago (1 children)

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

[–] [email protected] 1 points 6 hours ago (1 children)

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

[–] [email protected] 1 points 5 hours ago (1 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 4 hours ago

My household of 7 averages 900 watts year-round.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 17 hours ago* (last edited 10 hours ago)

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.

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