Apropos of nothing in particular, if any homelab enthusiasts are on here just felt like you should know that if your setup pulls 300W you're using a little more energy each week than my car does.
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Maybe, but if this is a hobby which requires more energy (which, to be clear, I don't know whether that's the case for your setup but I know it is for others) than the least efficient way to transport a person... might be worth some consideration.
very true - but much like car pooling, i share my abundance (both material and knowledge) with those who lack in those areas. i don't even know how much plex has saved me and those who rely on my server for their entertainment over the time I've been running it. but your point does stand.
I think it's an interesting conversation. I hope people won't either be shamed or defiant about "for fun" power use [at first], but instead just think about it and reflect on the cost-benefit mix.
I'm trying to think of a setup using 300W on average and it's either wildly inefficient or bonkers.
Either way, I think you would need to share it with other people or do some business on it to need that much power
Yeah, it's a worry., but it is working fine with Synology NAS, so its not completely hopeless. NUT does detect the UPS, but it errors out in the process of adding it.
Yeah, my house was wired by a madman and nearly the entire basement (where my server is) is running through one breaker. This includes the washing machine, for some unfathomable reason. At least it motivated me to finally get a UPS. 😅
I just checked, my MDF has a 20 amp breaker. The typical draw is about 180W at the wall (including PoE for six APs). The stuff in my home office is probably another 10-20W.
I'm in some strange middle ground. My initial setup had to live an an apartment living room, and only in the last years can I tolerate fan noise to some degree. Got a bunch of various SBC, and some 1L systems with 30W TDP chips. Planning to add a few "large" systems to start some virt soonish...
Idle HDDs use ~3W of power, so every NAS uses at least 10 watts ('double digits') when idle unless the disks aren't populated or they are intentionally spun down for some reason.
Between the video and this post, I finally went to check my usage. Peaking at 190W, with a lower average of 120W. Given I'm working from home and don't have a good means of travel (no car, bad busses), it's my sanity control, so I guess that's doing pretty well?
A few months ago I re-analyzed our power consumption and it turns out the 84 inch tv set is number one. Followed by cooling the office I built during covid which is needed to cool all the computer equipment which came in at number 3
I'm @ about 9W*5 for the orange pi nodes, plus a small 10 port switch and smallish 2 disk NAS (another 40w or so).. def under 100w total. I might add a smallish 6th node with an AI NPU that might chew up bit more tho.
I'm painfully aware of that, and it's a pretty large contributing factor to me planning on building a newer homelab so that I can retire this power hungry dinosaur. (700W power supply!) Actual usage is much less, but it predates many energy efficiency profiles.
The 24/7 power draw is painful, yeah...
It's totally worth it though; I love having 1K+ movies, HD shows and obscure anime available easily with Jellyfin/Plex/Emby (running all three rn lol)
Oh man, there are pros and cons to each still honestly with no clear winner yet imo. I've been using Jellyfin exclusively for the past month and it has been incredible. Super fast and configurable and installing/updating the server is a single command. cont ->
I had been mainly using Emby for a few years before trying Jellyfin and it is pretty dang good but I often found myself needing to switch back to Plex when some combo of codec/subtitle format or whatever didn't want to transcode to be casted to the tv. Surely something that they can iron out in time
Plex works decently well but it is so feature bloated and slow that it is annoying to use. They are also apparently going to remove the "watch together" feature soon which I really love to use when watching stuff on discord with friends. tl;dr I'd suggest trying Jellyfin at the current moment. 👍
the watch together removal is indeed unfortunate. neither i nor anyone else who uses my server has had any issues so i think it'll stay a 'don't fix what isn't broken' thing for now. thanks for the detailed response!
Forget about Emby, Jellyfin is free and perfectly fine.
The difference is you don't have any doodads Plex is giving like remote access or their recommendations.
After you set everything up it just works, no issues, including transcoding.
I need to clarify my message. You can access all of your hosted apps remotely as long as you set it up.
Plex basically sets it up for you and now they demand money for it.
Setting it up bu yourself is fairly easy with lots of resources on how to do that(open a port, connect a domain etc.)
i have friends who can barely manage the plex ecosystem as it is - i can't imagine implementing a less-smooth option, even as a backup. I'm glad there's other options but for now they're just not relevant to my needs
I'm about the same. Here's my power draw over the past 24 hours. Running 3 compute/storage machines, a couple raspis, a few rackmount switches, and a monitor.
When I'm running the big ion lasers, I'm pulling down a few kilowatts, but I hardly do that 24/7. Charging my tractor draws about 800 watts for a few hours.
Yeah but only WHEN you are heating electrically, which is just a few months a year for most people. I get your comment probably wasn't fully serious, but still.
One of my motivating factors for leaving SF was the cost of electricity, not gonna lie.
It wasn't like in the top 5 or anything but it was one of the things that made the economic argument a lot more compelling, effectively getting back $225/mo by paying for power somewhere it isn't $0.48/kWh
Would that taking ownership would bring the bill down much. Unfortunately with a century of maintenance backlog to work through, we're not getting low prices in the next few decades.
Sure but those poor bastards who lost everything still need to be compensated. Eliminating PG&E's maximum 6(?)% profit margin wouldn't reduce bills by more than that %age.
I seriously get jealous of people out of PGE jurisdiction all like “YEAH I CAN AFFORD TO RUN MY G5 BEOWULF CLUSTER 24/7 BECAUSE OUR POWER COMPANY DOESN’T SUCK”
Whereas I run a small SFF server and PGE wants to bankrupt me for it :(
Nah, used to run 2x R710s and a 36 bay storage server, and now I’m down to a single R730 and a DAS unit. More efficient (newer) hardware and less hardware overall.
There's one major bugbear left - a lack of manual battery preconditioning. They added this for 2025 so I'm holding out hope they will give us a software update which adds this. If they do it'll be as close to perfect as I can imagine any car will ever be for me.
Reminded of how analogue power meters draw around 5W for their voltage coil which could add up for collectors with a bunch of them running constantly
Like, it's not a lot still, but... it's somewhat funny to think about
I'm shocked that many people are actually running setups with more than like 200W. Most posts I see are people fanatically trying to reduce power by a few watts lol
Fun fact: I put my "homelab" in the same room as my heat pump water heater. I will also soon be venting the exhaust from my desktop PC into that room as well.
225 Watts total, Dell R730 with 2 nvme drives and 4 12TB Seagate spinners in unraid, with PoE Omada switch, 3 APs and a 10Gb Omada gateway, plus various home automation hubs.
I need a solar setup with battery backup. The HOA will never go for the panels. 😢
I'm assuming you actually mean 300 Wh. Since turning a profit is tough, energy cost per bitcoin likely matches its market price. At $82,262 per BTC and $0.05/kWh, mining one bitcoin likely takes ~1,650,000 kWh. So, 300 Wh would yield ~1.82×10⁻⁷ BTC. Probably very inaccurate though
i know this is totally unrelated to the question you asked me but i'm aware that having a battery is a great bonus for solar systems. do you know if there are any systems which allow for the car battery to be another battery the system can both pull from as well as push to?
I have solar and see no need for a battery. I just shift my big loads to off-peak and sell my excess energy back to the power company when rates are higher. A battery will almost assuredly never pay for itself. Unless you installed your solar too late and are stuck on PG&E NEM-3. Then you need one.
The equipment required is complex and the nuances of how to backfeed the grid / your house make it even worse.
To backfeed the *grid* a car could in theory send AC power out of the charge port. But because of our split-phase power system in the US, that doesn't work for 120V devices.
Yes, because AC charging on 240V does not connect the car to neutral.
If you're not super familiar with how our 240V works here this might not make any sense but most 240V devices, including a car when charging, are not connected to neutral. Just L1, L2, and ground.
And this means systems which want to provide backup power in an outage need to offload *DC* power from the car's battery and run an external inverter to provide split-phase 240V with 120V to neutral.
That's really the most expensive and complex bit, and currently it's bespoke to certain cars.
i'm a very simple man and my lack of understanding is how a battery sitting in a car would differ from a battery that is built into a domestic solar system.
what's stopping the car battery power going through the same channels that would normally send power back to the grid /into the home battery?
Not an IT guy myself, but coming from living off grid for over 25 years, I find this kind of realization fascinating. People have no idea how much power this stuff uses (or how much data they are moving) until you have to supply the power yourself!
Oh absolutely not, the 5 is so much more practical and highway driving isn't my main use case for my car anyway.
Also, bugbear of mine, the word "crossover SUV" has been reduced to mean absolutely nothing and anyone who actually looks at the Ioniq 5 next to a Camry should realize... it's a wagon.
IMO it’s right to call it a hatchback with its proportions. There’s a weird unwritten rule in car taxonomy that seems to say that sedans can be big or small but hatchbacks are only small. Which is silly.
I don’t drive enough miles to make getting an EV worthwhile (especially with Ohios $200/yr extra fee!), but am quite happy with my little Kia soul, it has so much room and it’s downright short, front to back. Plenty of room in my garage!
Same! Hatchbacks are great. Won’t go back to a sedan. I got a Solterra used and was a bit apprehensive about an EV, but I love it. Like you say, charges while I sleep. Wish it were a little longer like my Outback.
I hope the engineer hiding inside of you occasionally looks at your wagon and says to himself, "man, wouldn't a lower coefficient of drag be more prideful?"
The wagon practicality is nice to have, sometimes, but the best car is a car at 100% occupancy using the least energy to move.
Kind of makes me wonder how much energy it uses when you aren't self hosting, like how many kWh does Google or Netflix need to burn to provide a service per user, it's probably way more efficient since scale but it'd be interesting to know.
I do wonder if it might be a good idea for websites/services to have an energy rating, currently users don't get to know what the impact of what they are doing is and perhaps raising awareness of it could help people chose more efficient options.
It's not about how much energy you use, because renewable energy is just that renewable, it's about where you get it from, the basic necessities of life take lots of wattage, it's up to us to make it clean sourced
Because the act of me enjoying technology i.e. Video games and movies, should not cost the planet a generations worth of pollution... I can't control what companies do completely but I can do it for myself as much as humanly possible. It does matter.
I run Folding@Home on my computer pretty much any time I'm not gaming, so that's somewhere around 400-500W for most hours of the day. If I got an EV, it would probably be my third highest use of electricity, at most. Kind of a crazy way to think about energy use!
ML hasn't solved protein folding. It's okay at certain kinds of folding. When researchers need to know not just the resulting protein but also understand the steps, the process still needs to be simulated. So yeah, F@H is very much still running.
I want someone's opinion, for a bare minimum energy consumption setup.
Is it worth upgrading my 10years old CPU? Is the efficiency that much better now?
If you're just playing around with Linux, a recent Raspberry Pi may have close to the same compute power as your 10 year old CPU and the power draw is a rounding error. But if you've got a NAS with a bunch of spinning disks, those probably draw more power than the CPU.
Hi! RPi might look good on paper for some applications but it's quick to throttle. It's not on par with Skylake desktops for sure, but I'll say it's great for playing around :)
Half of my homelab bill is from keeping my rust spinning. Converting all my storage to SSD storage would pay for itself in 8 years, given current prices. I pay extra for falling-water-sourced electrons, so the environmental pressure doesn't overcome the financial pressure.
This is one of the main reasons I'm building my (very smol) home lab around raspberry pis and other energy efficient mini PCs and a larger desktop that only powers on when needed.
A 2.5w idle vs a 60w idle is an almost $90 difference in a year.
Yes the environmental and communal impact of data centers is something tech bros refuse to admit exists, and with Gen AI getting more popular, it’s getting exponentially worse. I.e. It takes 30x the power to prompt AI than it does for one Google search.
There is a huge amount of time and money spent on the efficiency of data centers because electrical power costs money and "techbros" are nothing if not cheap.
And the "30x the power" is absolute bullshit number someone made up who has no idea how data centers or computers actually work.
Fair point, I will concede I cannot find a source for the “30x” number and that’s on me. Older estimates I can find say 10x, but state that was likely an overestimate. There are organizations, papers, and studies that are trying to quantify it, but estimates are all over the place.
so the same stuff as, like, everything else produces? Data centers aren't even particularly large polluters. If you are upset about pollution, you should focus a lot more on cars and coal plants.
I'll admit AI has its uses but I'm baffled by Google's decision to push it to the top of search results. It blocks the things I'm actually looking for, is often wrong and is a massive energy hog. Where's the upside?
I can’t understand why they’re pushing it so much, it’s gotten so annoying that it actively pushes me away from using google, and I doubt I’m the only one
Absolutely. I’m not disparaging AI wholesale, there are countless good uses for it. Generative AI and companies forcing it down everyone’s throats is my issue. I’m moving away from Windows due to Copilot being integrated into everything.
I need to correct the "30x" number as pointed out by Tim Shea. At most, estimates of old models put it at 10x, and newer models at or slightly above the same power consumption depending on the prompt. But no publication that I can find so far has given definitive numbers.
My solution: have a home lab - don't have a car. Not being serious though, I just have the privilege of being in a place with actual public transit so I don't need a car. On a more serious note - didn't know that "EVs/electric stove consume too much energy" was even an argument, and now I'm sad
Yeah. One anti-EV argument is "too many more of those and the grid will collapse".
Meanwhile it's common for grids to offer discounts for power used overnight because it's cheaper to run a power plant that puts out consistent power and demand drops overnight.
And cars can schedule charging.
If my EV is plugged in from 6PM to 6AM and I only need 2 hours of charging to replace what I used that day in my commute, I actually don't care which two hours the car spends charging as long as it's done by 6.
I'm fine if my grid provider wants to control which two hours my car pulls power...
...as long as they allow me some means (even if the power is more expensive) to override that and charge right now because I know I have something coming up where I will need more energy in the "tank".
Funny story: During the Pandy I heated my home office in the winter using part of my homelab and my gaming PC running Folding @ Home on the Highest settings. Contributed over a Billion compute points to the project and saved money on heating oil (my elec company is cheap AF). So I believe that lmao
I suspect my biggest electric users on average are the freezers or the TV, on the whole it's around 10 - 12kWh a day. If I run the dishwasher that's 2kWh but not everyday.
LOLOL watching your latest video I could not stop thinking this wlthe whole time. My whole homelab averages about 250w but my power bill in Chicagoland is 120-140 a month
But charging EVs will take down the power grid!! 😜 I have trimmed mine down but can't get it much lower with a bunch of spinning drives and old Dell servers and all the network gear.
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I won't be happy until the sky is black and the people behind me are covered in my sooty exhaust!
I also tailgate anyone not going 90mph and create dangerous situations for everyone around!
Comparisons are how people start thinking about this stuff. And the tricky thing about humans is we all want different things.
What we should do more than we do is interrogate those wants.
Either way, I think you would need to share it with other people or do some business on it to need that much power
If you don't have a UPS on it, you should
The EV ended up at 5
(we have solar/battery for what its worth)
It's totally worth it though; I love having 1K+ movies, HD shows and obscure anime available easily with Jellyfin/Plex/Emby (running all three rn lol)
Transcoding has always been behind a paywall but now even remote streaming will be
The difference is you don't have any doodads Plex is giving like remote access or their recommendations.
After you set everything up it just works, no issues, including transcoding.
Plex basically sets it up for you and now they demand money for it.
Setting it up bu yourself is fairly easy with lots of resources on how to do that(open a port, connect a domain etc.)
This is for my whole rack though including UPS, 48 port switch for the house, and two PoE wifi APs
(i hope)
It wasn't like in the top 5 or anything but it was one of the things that made the economic argument a lot more compelling, effectively getting back $225/mo by paying for power somewhere it isn't $0.48/kWh
https://www.chelanpud.org/my-pud-services/rates-and-policies
Whereas I run a small SFF server and PGE wants to bankrupt me for it :(
There's one major bugbear left - a lack of manual battery preconditioning. They added this for 2025 so I'm holding out hope they will give us a software update which adds this. If they do it'll be as close to perfect as I can imagine any car will ever be for me.
Like, it's not a lot still, but... it's somewhat funny to think about
I need a solar setup with battery backup. The HOA will never go for the panels. 😢
I'd love to have an email server, a few game servers, and a file server- but- I do not want to pay that power bill.
V2H is the tech term to look for.
i didn't know if car charging cables/ports were a one-way affair or not.
is there any particular reason it's expensive?
To backfeed the *grid* a car could in theory send AC power out of the charge port. But because of our split-phase power system in the US, that doesn't work for 120V devices.
If you're not super familiar with how our 240V works here this might not make any sense but most 240V devices, including a car when charging, are not connected to neutral. Just L1, L2, and ground.
That's really the most expensive and complex bit, and currently it's bespoke to certain cars.
what's stopping the car battery power going through the same channels that would normally send power back to the grid /into the home battery?
Also, bugbear of mine, the word "crossover SUV" has been reduced to mean absolutely nothing and anyone who actually looks at the Ioniq 5 next to a Camry should realize... it's a wagon.
I thought the Kona was a big ol' crossover too until I used this site to compare it to the Prius I was driving and realized it wasn't big at all.
https://www.carsized.com/en/cars/compare/hyundai-ioniq-5-2021-suv-vs-toyota-camry-2017-sedan/
https://www.carsized.com/en/cars/compare/hyundai-kona-2017-suv-electric-vs-toyota-prius-2009-liftback/rear/
It's a slightly lifted Camry hatchback. It's got a few extra inches of height but length/width are nearly identical.
The wagon practicality is nice to have, sometimes, but the best car is a car at 100% occupancy using the least energy to move.
Maybe then I can finally afford the upfront cost
Is folding at home still running and if so why?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P_fHJIYENdI
Is it worth upgrading my 10years old CPU? Is the efficiency that much better now?
If it's "free from work" server hardware that draws 100W+ at base load, it probably makes sense to look at upgrading.
But if you're running a bunch of spinning disks, changing CPU may have minimal impact
Loved your vid today.
Like, saying "100W" makes me immediately think of an ancient light bulb, riding a bike, human base metabolic rate.
A 2.5w idle vs a 60w idle is an almost $90 difference in a year.
Although if you compare the computing power of couple mini pcs with a regular one it's in favor of the second one
Gonna make calls from my analog phone to make myself feel better.
Except in all those datacenters...
And the "30x the power" is absolute bullshit number someone made up who has no idea how data centers or computers actually work.
Meanwhile it's common for grids to offer discounts for power used overnight because it's cheaper to run a power plant that puts out consistent power and demand drops overnight.
And cars can schedule charging.
I'm fine if my grid provider wants to control which two hours my car pulls power...
I only use 2TB but you never know bro
They were so cheap bro
🙃
+$30/m in 2018's power bills