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.
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.
My microwave, I think?
The NAS itself probably takes most of the power, which isnt logged. My server is a Raspberry Pi 5, so used 1.86kWh in September.

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).
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.
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.
That’s the one thing I don’t like about Truenas. It technically can spin down disks, but there’s no way to force them. You can set the idle timer to 5 minutes, but then it constantly spins them back up again. Now I just power the entire system down with home assistant outside of the usage hours and I can power it up again with home assistant using wake on Lan.
A bit goofy, but it works for me
Yeah I use Unraid for multiple reasons but being able to spin down disks when not in use was a big factor. I have 6 mechanical drives totalling 56TB of usuable storage so it was important to me they don’t all need to be on at the same time. TrueNAS also comes with some other headaches, I like being able to drop in whatever disk I need to for expansion or replacement.
I like being able to drop in whatever disk I need to for expansion or replacement.
I didn’t move that far away (to Debian + ZFS), so that limitation still remains. Although the addition of Raid-Z expansion should alleviate things quite a bit.
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.
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.
is mining worth it for you?
I’d say no more than 15W.
1x Jetson Nano
1x SSD
3x 2.5" HDDs
1x RPi 3B wih Pihole7 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.
Like 3-12w but I’m only running a little mostly jellyfin server
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
RRD
That’s a name I haven’t heard in a minute!
I see the rrdtool gallery is still up and my graph is still in there 🤭. (No it’s not the Christmas graph, that one’s insane.)
I’m using Influx nowadays but maybe I should revisit good old rrdtool for old times’ sake.
It seemed like the easiest way to store multiple years of data in a format that wouldn’t change or disappear.
I found it super easy to work with as a never-went-to-school programmer (in the rime before claude).
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.
About 80 W. I do Folding@Home
3 Lenovo Tiny’s, one HP Mini, 3 external drives, a switch and 2 modems runs just under 100W.





