Homelab Problems
Posted Jan 17, 2020, 5:18 PM UTC
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Flexing dat electricity bill :P
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How? Why? My entire lab pulls a whopping 367 watts at full load, turn on your CPU throttling and when is idle it pulls less then 75 watts... and that is with a full NAS box with 10gbe link to a VM running plex with 10+ VMs running along with a spare laptop and a 32 inch TV acting as a system monitor.
Part of the fun of a home lab is getting your power management under control and turning all that stuff on and tuning it, you should be able to bring that down significantly.
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https://i.imgur.com/KU7EPfG.png
My homelab is effectively a production environment for my home. It pulls about 2,100 watts. I could kill an ASA from the failover bundle and save 150 watts, but the rest of it runs 24/7.
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That is some spicy storage in those servers. I would live to have an array comprised of that. lol. Love it.
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Awesome!
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That looks like an expensive California electricity bill. 3 megawatts gotta be about 1100 bucks?
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I did the math above. You're close but it's even more expensive if you're on the E-1 tier (Not an electric car). After about 1,300kWh you're looking at 50 cents/kWh!
$1,252.74
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I haven’t changed yet to the new ev plans yet. Plan to later when I improve the electrical in my house.
That’s a healthy electric bill lol
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Thankfully, I live in the midwest and my bill is around $400.
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Per month?!?!
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It's weird how electricity companies always try to shame their high users. Shouldn't it be more of a "thank you for your business" type letter? It seems like they actively want to sell less of their only product.
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Selling less for more is better business.
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They have other products. Transmission fees. The fees to get power to your house over the wires. My frigging transmission fees are always higher than the electric I used.
Eff the electric company!
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Residential rates are set by a public commission for residential rates. Businesses pay a larger rate and industrial clients pay a very high fee. So the more electricity they can sell to the industry, the more profit they make. I think the residential rate is usually set so the electric company breaks even, at least in the US. So they want to sell less to clients that generate 0 profits and more to higher profit centers.
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Combine homelab with a cooking hobby and there's no escape. Gas bill way higher than my electric and my electrics pretty bad.
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i have a lot more going on than my flairs suggest including some for profit things.
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Most impressive! It just goes to show there's always somebody bigger!
How do you keep your homelab cool with that much power?
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mini split ac , and its in my basement which stays cool
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LAFF!!
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It's not actually funny in this day and age to be using that much. Don't gaf but it's true
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Why do you say that? My usage isn't quite that high, but its over 2MWh/month. I choose the fully renewable option my electricity provider offers so there should be no carbon cost to my hobby. Electricity consumption doesn't have to be a bad thing.
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2MWh/month? The fuck are you running?
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A couple of file servers, VM clusters, heat pump. Nothing major. My server gear is on all the time. Big servers use big power. There are 720 hours in a month. A 1kw machine will use 720 kwh/mo. I also have 2 kids, so that adds up. Also, living way up north means lights are on a lot more.
You do realize that op is just over 3MWh, right? These aren't overly large numbers.
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The bulk of the power draw is for my main rack. It pulls 2,100 watts fairly consistently. That power draw comes from two 2U servers, two switches, a NAS, an external disk shelf, a KVM switch, a router, a wireless controller, two APs, two firewalls, and one router. It doesn't take much to push a high KWh draw with a homelab.
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Yeah, sorry, I got my units mixed up. I saw megawatt and was concerned by how much you were using, but over a month it’s not much
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Heat pump up north?!? Hope you got backup heat my friend. Those things crap the bed starting at 40°F and get down to a useless energy sucking cool air blower when it's in the teens and single digits.
Unless it's a water source heat pump and you have a geothermal loop that is. Then they work great in the cold.
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Well, we don't know how big and old OP's house if and if they are heating with electricity in the Winter. How many people in the household. Maybe they cook a lot or their partner is a stay-at-home parent? I don't think gives a full picture. My electric consumption is also high since I have a large fish tank but commute by electric train to work so I'm pretty sure my carbon footprint is lower than the average Joe.
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True true I just don't think it's something to be overly proud of these days, like the meme was indicating how cool it read to be using so much power, when we should all be proud to be more greener
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Here's the current rack:
https://i.imgur.com/KU7EPfG.png
There are two additional 3602e access points and another Catalyst 3850 serving other parts of the house.
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Damn your running full SSD in your lab? What was the cost of the SSDs alone ?
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I'm a storage engineer and a lot of my test workloads involve storage, so it's by far the biggest expense in my homelab. I got a very decent bulk discount on the 2TB SSDs, but it still cost me more than the rest of the lab combined. The 512GB SSDs were pretty reasonable.
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Nice thank you for the information. Was wondering why you need SSD only but this is a pretty reasonable answer. I think you high electrical bill comes from the old X series CPUs they are pretty power hungry.
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Soooooooo 2x 4x4 tents running 600w? I mean.... plex
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Bad bot
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Are you sure about that? Because I am 98.5996% sure that Cosmic_Failure is not a bot.
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I'm not a bot, but we do have pre-made removal messages due to the high number of low effort posts that we get.
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Im guessing you live in the US. Whats your kw price? Here in Sweden i pay around 16c/kw with tax and infrastructure fees
I live in the midwest, where energy is thankfully cheap. I pay about $0.105 per KWh.
ouchies! mine is .07 in texas
I'm going to have to tell my wife to pack her bags, we're moving to Texas!
Sounds like a dream. German prices are about 0,3-0,32€ per kWh...
Luckily with the upcoming raise by my current power provider it's finally cheaper to switch over to green power/gas
I live in quebec where price in CAD$ is 0.03$ to 0.08$
US varies greatly. In California, that would be a very expensive bill. They use a tiered system where the more you buy, the most expensive it gets. Kinda like a reverse discount... Here's the breakdown for 3,031 kWh if that was me:
Tier 1 304.50KwH @ 0.22981 = $69.98
Tier 2 (Max 3x your baseline) 913.50 kWh @ $0.28920 = $264.18
High Usage (Anything else) 1813 kWh @ $0.50667 = $918.59
Total bill for OP in California: $1,252.74
Wow the payoff time on solar panels must be like a year4