I am smarting up my home with lots of ZigBee thingies and decided to add a ZigBee smart monitor to my selfhost setup.
Its a desktop box with a core i7 9th gen, 48gb ram, no monitor.
I used to have 4xSSD 4TB + 2xHDD 6TB. Three RAID1 for a total of 4+4+6=14Tbs.
Power was sitting at 50W.
I restructured my storage: 1 RAID5 with the 4 SSDs (12tb) and removed the 2 HDDs.
Power went down to 38W!
I am amazed.
In the future will run just 1 hdd for storing backups and keep it spinned down 99% of the time.
PS: the above wattage is during transcoding, so with high CPU and disk usage…
Most of the hardware itself was free(business decommissioned) or auction wins (4.5TB of ram out of a $600 auction, selling some servers paid the whole auction off). So quite cheap in that respect. And it’s not strictly private use. Lots of functions in there to keep my business going/make it easier to track taxes/auto billing clients/email/etc. Though only typically operationally, not as an income generator itself (eg, not hosting other companies stuff so much).
And yeah, if energy was 10x more expensive (I think it was you or someone else that said $0.60 per kWh?) I’d probably rethink my situation/stance a bit.
But 3kW service is awfully low. Standard around here is 200amp service to a house (at 120v, so 24kVA service), 100amp (12kVA) if you have gas utilities handling range/heating, as A/C is heavily required where I live. My PV setup is rated 15.9kW, though caps out at 11kW on the best days. I can’t imagine living off of 3kW. My desktop uses 1/10th of that. My idle usage in my house minus the servers is ~2kW. I can see why you’re squeezing Watts. Some googling shows Italy being a country that does this… You probably are in similar situation as them where A/C isn’t really common, heating and cooking isn’t electric based, etc… Most of the year I’m not allowed to even make a fire, so I’m forced to rely on electricity.
But no SUV here… 1 hybrid sedan for this family of 4. Gas costs too much and we drive too little.
I missed the business part… That make absolutely sense and gives out a different prospect. Here, you would be able to write off taxes all your home rig expenses I think.
Yes, factoring in all energy costs (including the public television tax which is part of your utility bills) energy cost me 60€c per kWh.
We use gas extensively, but for heating I use wood pellets with an idro-stove (heats the water that then circulate in the heaters).
In summer I can use ac for those nights that doesn’t cool off, but during the day having 50cm thick stone walls never heats up enough inside. Winter are a different story, heating is on from 1 October to 1 of may, and here Home Assistant with per-room ZigBee thermostats and thermovalves is helping a lot to keep the pellet usage down to 2x15kg bags per day when its below freezing outside in daytime.
Until we upgraded from 3kWh to 6kWh (at nice 300€ price point) we frequently had the power disconnected because the oven was on while drying hairs… Or washer and toaster… What a fun ride.
3kWh is actually enough only for a condo, not for a house, but still it’s how it works here.
All my hardware is refurbished from work, got it from surplus or things going to be dismissed. And way overpowered for the services I run (full arr stack, Usenet and torrents, WebDAV and filebrowser sharing, navidrome jellyfin actual budget homepage romm radicale and stuff I surely forgot).
I even have two ISPs for redundancy because living in the woods make it unreliable, so FWA (5G 300mbps but capped) and FTTC (20 shitty mbps but uncapoed) it is.