So my KW/h rate has gone from 0.0817 to 0.1315 in the last two years. I went from paying $219 a month for electric to $450+ and I could no longer justify this and needed to take action - this is what I have done.
- For storage I had 3-R710’s with 6-4tb drives each, I moved to a new to me QNAP with 6 brand new 20tb WD Red drives and moved all of the data to that and unplugged the R710’s.
- I moved ESXi and Guests from an r630 to a new to me Dell Precision 3650.
- I moved PFSense from an R410 to a new to me Protectli Vault micro appliance.
- I retired the Cisco Catalyst 3560-X in favor of a new to me low power HPE 48p selectable POE switch.
- I put my backup host (Dell Optiplex with a 4th gen i5) running Veeam on a smart switch. I have a script that shuts the computer down after the backups complete and then an hour later the smart switch powers off. The smart switch powers on the computer and I have the bios set to power on the computer after a power outage. This happens three times a week.
- I set a group policy to set the Windows power plan to balanced from high performance for my computer and my GFs computer. This has dropped both of our computers from using 150w+ to 20-30w at idle. Identical computers 11900k/3080ti EVGA FTW3
- My torrent host is another Dell Optiplex with a 10th gen i5, I have that set to Windows power saver mode and max 45% CPU / min 0%, it uses less than 1w at idle now.
- I recently install a whole home energy monitor into my main panel and integrated it into HomeAssistant so I can log and monitor. (see imgur picture)
- On top of all of this I have set my water heater from 145F to 135F, unplugged unused devices in unused rooms too.
I am happy to say my mini production environment is now running stronger and cooler, the ambient air temp in the basement has dropped from 86F to 70F. The best part of this is I just got my latest energy bill. I went from $510 last month to $270 this month! Nothing else has changed other than what I have posted here today.
Check out this screenshot of the energy monitor, with both gaming desktops, both fans, and all the basement lights and TV/AV receiver powered right now, I am only using 600ish watts! Before that I was using over 2.5kw/h
https://imgur.com/a/uqblvyw
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What’s that HPE switch model?
I’m running a Cisco 2960X atm and an Aruba 2930F JL258A currently.
I also have 2 Cisco WS-C3560CX-8PC-S and 3 C1000-8FP-2G-S switches I can swap things out for.
Waiting for “winter” to get here in the south so I can run some ethernet cable through the attic to a few places and finally mount my network rack on the wall.
$.08+ /kwh USD here, and I still opted for the lowest powered 24x7 network gear feasible. Once I calculated cost/watt/year, the economics of doing lower power became real even for lower costs like mine.
Good choices, OP!!!
Don’t turn off the smart switch! Power cycle when you want the machine to boot. Killing all power will drain your CMOS battery faster because there is no standby power. Last thing you want is finding out your backups failed or drives got corrupted because it was no longer booting to the OS and getting a hard shutdown repeatedly.
Do you have a source for that claim? I power off my desktop contantly and have done so for years, and i have only replaced 1 CMOS battery ever. Which was for a 9 year old motherboard. So i am a bit skeptical.
I’m confused. How much was your idle draw before in total?
Can you give more info on your energy monitor device? How does that work and what is it called?
I have been on a similar quest. I’ve gone from 500w to 50w over the last few years, starting with 2 r710s pimped out to the max, to a flash only white box athlon build. Slightly miss idrac, but a decent trade for it being 50w and so quiet I can only tell it’s on by the LEDs.
Look into PiKVM. Costs a bit to build, but may be worth it.
Thank you, but in all honesty, this white box job boots so fast I no longer have to babysit the boot process, and on the rare occasion I need to mess with it at firmware level, ill just walk out to the garage :) given how far ive come, another 10w or so running a KVM would reduce my power saving from the pleasing 90% ive achived :)
i am paying about 20 usd for that rating for 3 months prices are crazy in us
Serious question.
Why didn’t you bring the hot water heater down to 120?
Usually the mixing valve is required to be at 120 or below, so keeping the tank hotter won’t be noticed
Not OP, but the hotter the tank the more effective capacity you get after mixing it. So if you want to run long showers/baths, higher temp makes sense. And as long as the tank is well insulated, the higher temp shouldnt make a huge difference long term, my water tank reaches temp and then turns off until its next used, its not frequently reheating.
How can I save on electricity?
Why not virutalize pfsense and that torrent box? An extra 2 computers unplugged.
Personally I wouldn’t want to virtualize pfSense. It needs to be it’s own piece of hardware so it isn’t affected if you need to take the main server down.
What I did, which probably applies to almost nobody: Downgraded my home servers to a single Beelink Mini PC; still gets the job done, though it is slower. Offloaded a bunch of stuff, including backups and video stuff, to my much more powerful work server and NAS. My work has a lease with electricity included. (It’s my business, so I’m not doing anything fishy.) Old hardware is sitting unused. The one downside to this is that my older setup was using ~20% CPU all the time, whereas the new one uses like ~60% and goes to 100% at peaks. I don’t notice it in practice.
Also, I added solar panels to my house. So even if I were paying for my older setup, it would’ve been covered.
It’s okay…. I still have 4 r910s that my deepest pleas for upgrades remain unheard to this day.
What region of the world?
Jeez you guys are paying so much for power! I pay $0.10 kwh so power costs for me is of no concern. I just let my servers sip away.
What route did you go for energy monitoring?