12 ms·

Its fascinating that electricity is really the biggest cost of computing. I put a server in my house which was supposed to save money, but actually the electric

by rr888 4y ago

Its fascinating that electricity is really the biggest cost of computing. I put a server in my house which was supposed to save money, but actually the electricity cost was something I hadn't thought of and really adds up. esp when the AC has to run to remove the extra heat. So much old hardware out there but its going to get junked as new hw is more efficient.

PeterisP 4y ago
It's like with refrigerators - when some years ago it was both cost-efficient and even 'green' to scrap working refrigerators and replace them with new ones, because the difference in improved energy efficiency meant that the electricity cost savings outweighed the cost of the new refrigerator already within a year or two and the reduced pollution from less electricity (at the time, fossil fuels) outweighed the environmental cost/waste of making that new refrigerator.
- Timshel 4y ago
  Not the first time I see someone saying this for refrigerators and I don't understand how it could be possible. From what I can find even in extreme case it's not true. Even with a fridge from 1972 which averaged 1726kw/h (Source: https://www.annualreviews.org/doi/10.1146/annurev.energy.27.122001.083452 https://www.annualreviews.org/doi/10.1146/annurev.energy.27....) to a more recent one which will probably be around 400kwh. And with the kwh at 0.15$ (https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/APU000072610 https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/APU000072610). You obtain a reduction of (1726-400) * 0.15 ~= 200$ a year. I believe the average refrigerator price in the USA is over 400$ so I can't understand where the 2 years figure would come from without even talking about trying to supposedly be "green" ... And after 1988 you are down to 800kwh so you would gain something like 60$ a year.
  - bombcar 4y ago
    You can get some pretty cheap fridges https://www.bestbuy.com/site/insignia-10-cu-ft-top-freezer-refrigerator-with-reversible-door-white/6449409.p?skuId=6449409 https://www.bestbuy.com/site/insignia-10-cu-ft-top-freezer-r... - but as you suspect it's post-facto justification of a purchase someone wanted to make anyway. Once you account for manufacturing and disposal, running the older is probably almost always better.
    - Timshel 4y ago
      Yes and it even has a lower energy usage : ~300kw/h :). But since you probably upgraded from a similar one then you are probably more inline with the 60$ I mention at the end and not 200$. From what I understand high end fridge are often less efficient because of features like ice fountain or freezer in the lower part with drawers instead of doors. Anyway I'm thinking it's probably not just post-facto justification because it looks too much like a seller pitch and wondering where it comes from. I'm French and I had never heard it.
  - Macha 4y ago
    1. Electricity in other countries is more expensive. e.g. in Ireland it is €0.35/kwh (~$0.40). 2. Other countries have smaller houses, therefore smaller kitchens therefore smaller refrigerators. Between that and higher energy efficiency standards in general, new refrigerators in my local store vary from 230kwh (A energy rating) to 260kwh (F energy rating) in power usage.
    - Timshel 4y ago
      For your second point it probably applied 10/20 years ago too, then it means you have an even smaller budget to make some economy. So even when doubling electricity price I fail to see how it could be possible to reach the two years originally mentioned. And I believe each time I have seen this 2 years figure mentioned it was probably USA centric conversation. I'm French and I had never heard of it before.
  - happyopossum 4y ago
    $0.15 is laughably cheap for some parts of the country... Here in California it's not uncommon to pay 3x that, so $600/yr in electricity saved by a $400 appliance is a huge deal.
    - simfree 4y ago
      Even here in expensive Seattle our top rate (when you go above 500kWh a month, which is $0.1056/kWh) is $0.1307 per kWh. If you go just north the top rate falls to $0.10/kWh, and many PUDs in the state charge around half that price.
  - tedunangst 4y ago
    I plugged my parents 1960 fridge into a kilowatt and it used so little power I had to leave it plugged in for several days to make sure I got a reasonable reading. Something like 2 kwhr per day. So it would take about five years for a replacement to pay for itself if the replacement ran on nothing but happy thoughts.
  - massysett 4y ago
    Folks make these same sort of claims on high-efficiency HVAC systems and I never get them to pencil out. The higher efficiency doesn’t pay for itself even over the entire lifespan of the system. Inevitably the people making these claims sell HVAC systems.
Loic 4y ago
In Germany, my rule of thumb was that a constant 1W load is 1€/year. This year, I had to update it, it is now more something like 3€/year. The increase is so important I am still not sure if my calculations are right! 1W x 24h x 365 = 8760Wh My current price: 0.33€/kWh (100% renewable) 8.76kWh x 0.33€/kWh = 2.89€
- zapt02 4y ago
  You can use Nord Pool data for the last couple of years to do estimations. https://www.nordpoolgroup.com/en/Market-data1/Dayahead/Area-Prices/de-lu/hourly/?view=table https://www.nordpoolgroup.com/en/Market-data1/Dayahead/Area-...
  - ReadTheLicense 4y ago
    You have day-ahead pricing at home? Please tell me how
    - zapt02 4y ago
      It will depend on where you live, very common in Sweden with many companies offering it.
    - joneskoo 4y ago
      Spot price (+margin) contracts became common in Finland at least some years ago. Most energy companies provide them now. The margin is something like 0.30–0.40 cent/kWh. We buy energy from any Finnish seller with contract separate from transfer of electricity (a natural monopoly).
      - simfree 4y ago
        That margin is more than many commercial and industrial customers pay in Washington State. In the cheaper public utility districts here, the per kWh price is only double those rates, with no time of day pricing or similar shenanigans.
s1artibartfast 4y ago
Electricity is a significant opex for many products including Agriculture. For example, I've seen Farmers cost as high as 50% for power, generally to move or pump water
wongarsu 4y ago
There's a reason used servers are so cheap on ebay: if you run them 24/7 their electricity cost makes them unattractive compared to new hardware (often within a year).
- mynameisvlad 4y ago
  Highly disagree. Said in another comment, my server averages around 100-200W. It's equivalent to running a gaming PC. The reason there's a lot of cheap servers on eBay is that their support contracts expired and are absolutely ridiculously expensive to maintain for a big company. It's easier to get a new server (which will likely have performance and efficiency upgrades as well) than to continue maintaining a server that no longer has a support contract. The reason there's not many servers in people's hands is size and noise. Servers aren't meant to go in a house; most people don't have server racks in their home. And by default, the fans are jet engines, even behind closed doors.
  - vorpalhex 4y ago
    A fan replacement and activating quiet mode on the server (usually a bios option or sometimes a hardware tweak) helps with the noise a ton at the cost of slightly less thermal ceiling.
    - mynameisvlad 4y ago
      That's why I said "by default". I have done the IPMI toggles needed to lower the fans but it's still not quiet by any stretch of the imagination.
  - Gasp0de 4y ago
    You probably live in the USA, because 200w 24/7 would cost me about 600€/year which is definitely significant.
    - collegeburner 4y ago
      one of the upsides to living in texas, lots of cheap wind power lol. even with more expensive electricity i can still run old hardware for cheap. means less e waste also.
philjohn 4y ago
This is why for my home server I didn't get second hand servers but built the following in a 2U case that fits in my network closet: Asrock Rack c246 WSI (Mini ITX workstation board) 32GB DDR4 ECC Udimms (16GB x2) Core i3 9100T (25w, low power 4 core part, supports ECC, and quicksync) 6 IronWolf 4TB NAS drives The 6 drives are in RaidZ2 so give 16TB usable space, and at full pelt the max power consumption is 60W for everything.
- mynameisvlad 4y ago
  My R730 averages at around 100-200W with two 12-core CPUs, 128GB RAM and 8 12-14TB drives. Servers are more efficient than people give them credit for. It's close to a gaming PC in electricity usage. Certainly not 60W (or what people can get with NUCs and RPi clusters) but for the power I get, it's very much worth it.
  - TylerE 4y ago
    I'd guess the issue isn't so much peak consumption but idle.
  - happyopossum 4y ago
    If we average that out to 150W, that'd be 1250-1300Kwh/yr. Current Bay Area electric prices means that'd cost in excess of $500/yr to run. I'd say that servers are not more efficient than people are giving them credit for...
    - mynameisvlad 4y ago
      And at Seattle prices, that's $150, so I don't exactly see what the purpose of your anecdote is other than to mention how pricy your electricity is. Edit: But even at $500, that's pretty much the price of a low-spec VPS or VM per year. So for a fairly low initial price to buy the server, you're getting far more performance for the same price you'd pay someone else to use theirs.
    - manfre 4y ago
      Servers are more efficient when fully utilized. A commercial grade server in a homelab is more likely to idle all the time, making it very energy wasteful. Servers need to be right-sized, instead of "more is better".
spurgu 4y ago
Well the electricity prices (according to the article) rose 55% in Germany and 83% in Finland, while the server prices are just going up by 10%, so electricity is just a part of it.
iforgotpassword 4y ago
Don't use a "server" server, unless you really need that. Use a desktop from a few years ago, from some oem who advertises power efficiency. Stuff it full of hdds and ram. I've made very good experiences with Fujitsu. The power consumption figures they publish in their energy consumption white papers has been matching my measurements very well, so you can check ebay for used machines that match your performance/price expectations and then google eg "p920 energy white paper" and check the pdf. (Note, some models are available with different PSUs, ie 90+ and 85+.) My "home server" mostly idles at 14W with one hdd running, one in standby and one ssd.
- lillecarl 4y ago
  This is the way. You don't need high density at home (usually) so don't pay the price for it. Get a mobo with ECC ram that fits an ATX case if you want server grade stuff. If you don't use stupid tech like VMware it won't eat your resources either (not that VMware is bad in a datacenter, but it is quite resource hungry in comparison to virt-manager or Proxmox). I mean unless databases or Java are your favorite things in the world. Configure power saving as well, that way your CPU really doesn't consume a lot.
  - mistrial9 4y ago
    > mobo with ECC ram that fits an ATX case yes, and careful choice of graphics card; GPU computing is special purpose and can be costly in an urban area
    - lillecarl 4y ago
      Indeed, I don't know how dense the megascalers build, it looks less dense than what I see at work compared to the few videos that are out there.
- npteljes 4y ago
  Same conclusion here. Initially I used an old notebook with USB cases for full-size HDDs, nowadays it'n an older desktop PC in a midi tower, with some extra memory and HDDs. Idle power is <20W, which is most of the time. I really wanted a proper server for the cool factor, but it's just so expensive to maintain.
amelius 4y ago
As a rule of thumb, 1W costs about $1 per year.
difflens 4y ago
I've been wondering over the past few months if we can build a "public" cloud. I have some old machines gathering dust, I'm sure others do too. Is it feasible to build an ad-hoc network of such computers where the compute power is rented out. For ex: I can connect my old lenovo i5 laptop to this network for 6hrs a day and charge 1.2x my electricy cost. Sort of like on demand EC2 instances, but backed by torrent like tech. It'd make computers pay for themselves over time
kappuchino 4y ago
In order to keep my eletricity bill for a running system in my apartment to then minimum I researched the specs & prices from the "The Power Consumption Database"[1] and found an intel nuc running on 5watts idle. Thats the same class of power consumption of a raspi 4 8GB, but easier to maintain. Now I'm waiting for my a Coral TPU USB-Accelarator to keep the peak consumption down for some recognition tasks in homeassistant. [1]http://www.tpcdb.com/list.php?type=13 http://www.tpcdb.com/list.php?type=13

by rr888 4y ago

PeterisP 4y ago

It's like with refrigerators - when some years ago it was both cost-efficient and even 'green' to scrap working refrigerators and replace them with new ones, because the difference in improved energy efficiency meant that the electricity cost savings outweighed the cost of the new refrigerator already within a year or two and the reduced pollution from less electricity (at the time, fossil fuels) outweighed the environmental cost/waste of making that new refrigerator.

Timshel 4y ago
Not the first time I see someone saying this for refrigerators and I don't understand how it could be possible. From what I can find even in extreme case it's not true. Even with a fridge from 1972 which averaged 1726kw/h (Source: https://www.annualreviews.org/doi/10.1146/annurev.energy.27.122001.083452 https://www.annualreviews.org/doi/10.1146/annurev.energy.27....) to a more recent one which will probably be around 400kwh. And with the kwh at 0.15$ (https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/APU000072610 https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/APU000072610). You obtain a reduction of (1726-400) * 0.15 ~= 200$ a year. I believe the average refrigerator price in the USA is over 400$ so I can't understand where the 2 years figure would come from without even talking about trying to supposedly be "green" ... And after 1988 you are down to 800kwh so you would gain something like 60$ a year.
- bombcar 4y ago
  You can get some pretty cheap fridges https://www.bestbuy.com/site/insignia-10-cu-ft-top-freezer-refrigerator-with-reversible-door-white/6449409.p?skuId=6449409 https://www.bestbuy.com/site/insignia-10-cu-ft-top-freezer-r... - but as you suspect it's post-facto justification of a purchase someone wanted to make anyway. Once you account for manufacturing and disposal, running the older is probably almost always better.
  - Timshel 4y ago
    Yes and it even has a lower energy usage : ~300kw/h :). But since you probably upgraded from a similar one then you are probably more inline with the 60$ I mention at the end and not 200$. From what I understand high end fridge are often less efficient because of features like ice fountain or freezer in the lower part with drawers instead of doors. Anyway I'm thinking it's probably not just post-facto justification because it looks too much like a seller pitch and wondering where it comes from. I'm French and I had never heard it.
- Macha 4y ago
  1. Electricity in other countries is more expensive. e.g. in Ireland it is €0.35/kwh (~$0.40). 2. Other countries have smaller houses, therefore smaller kitchens therefore smaller refrigerators. Between that and higher energy efficiency standards in general, new refrigerators in my local store vary from 230kwh (A energy rating) to 260kwh (F energy rating) in power usage.
  - Timshel 4y ago
    For your second point it probably applied 10/20 years ago too, then it means you have an even smaller budget to make some economy. So even when doubling electricity price I fail to see how it could be possible to reach the two years originally mentioned. And I believe each time I have seen this 2 years figure mentioned it was probably USA centric conversation. I'm French and I had never heard of it before.
- happyopossum 4y ago
  $0.15 is laughably cheap for some parts of the country... Here in California it's not uncommon to pay 3x that, so $600/yr in electricity saved by a $400 appliance is a huge deal.
  - simfree 4y ago
    Even here in expensive Seattle our top rate (when you go above 500kWh a month, which is $0.1056/kWh) is $0.1307 per kWh. If you go just north the top rate falls to $0.10/kWh, and many PUDs in the state charge around half that price.
- tedunangst 4y ago
  I plugged my parents 1960 fridge into a kilowatt and it used so little power I had to leave it plugged in for several days to make sure I got a reasonable reading. Something like 2 kwhr per day. So it would take about five years for a replacement to pay for itself if the replacement ran on nothing but happy thoughts.
- massysett 4y ago
  Folks make these same sort of claims on high-efficiency HVAC systems and I never get them to pencil out. The higher efficiency doesn’t pay for itself even over the entire lifespan of the system. Inevitably the people making these claims sell HVAC systems.

Loic 4y ago

In Germany, my rule of thumb was that a constant 1W load is 1€/year. This year, I had to update it, it is now more something like 3€/year. The increase is so important I am still not sure if my calculations are right! 1W x 24h x 365 = 8760Wh My current price: 0.33€/kWh (100% renewable) 8.76kWh x 0.33€/kWh = 2.89€

zapt02 4y ago
You can use Nord Pool data for the last couple of years to do estimations. https://www.nordpoolgroup.com/en/Market-data1/Dayahead/Area-Prices/de-lu/hourly/?view=table https://www.nordpoolgroup.com/en/Market-data1/Dayahead/Area-...
- ReadTheLicense 4y ago
  You have day-ahead pricing at home? Please tell me how
  - zapt02 4y ago
    It will depend on where you live, very common in Sweden with many companies offering it.
  - joneskoo 4y ago
    Spot price (+margin) contracts became common in Finland at least some years ago. Most energy companies provide them now. The margin is something like 0.30–0.40 cent/kWh. We buy energy from any Finnish seller with contract separate from transfer of electricity (a natural monopoly).
    - simfree 4y ago
      That margin is more than many commercial and industrial customers pay in Washington State. In the cheaper public utility districts here, the per kWh price is only double those rates, with no time of day pricing or similar shenanigans.

s1artibartfast 4y ago

Electricity is a significant opex for many products including Agriculture. For example, I've seen Farmers cost as high as 50% for power, generally to move or pump water

wongarsu 4y ago

There's a reason used servers are so cheap on ebay: if you run them 24/7 their electricity cost makes them unattractive compared to new hardware (often within a year).

mynameisvlad 4y ago
Highly disagree. Said in another comment, my server averages around 100-200W. It's equivalent to running a gaming PC. The reason there's a lot of cheap servers on eBay is that their support contracts expired and are absolutely ridiculously expensive to maintain for a big company. It's easier to get a new server (which will likely have performance and efficiency upgrades as well) than to continue maintaining a server that no longer has a support contract. The reason there's not many servers in people's hands is size and noise. Servers aren't meant to go in a house; most people don't have server racks in their home. And by default, the fans are jet engines, even behind closed doors.
- vorpalhex 4y ago
  A fan replacement and activating quiet mode on the server (usually a bios option or sometimes a hardware tweak) helps with the noise a ton at the cost of slightly less thermal ceiling.
  - mynameisvlad 4y ago
    That's why I said "by default". I have done the IPMI toggles needed to lower the fans but it's still not quiet by any stretch of the imagination.
- Gasp0de 4y ago
  You probably live in the USA, because 200w 24/7 would cost me about 600€/year which is definitely significant.
  - collegeburner 4y ago
    one of the upsides to living in texas, lots of cheap wind power lol. even with more expensive electricity i can still run old hardware for cheap. means less e waste also.

philjohn 4y ago

This is why for my home server I didn't get second hand servers but built the following in a 2U case that fits in my network closet: Asrock Rack c246 WSI (Mini ITX workstation board) 32GB DDR4 ECC Udimms (16GB x2) Core i3 9100T (25w, low power 4 core part, supports ECC, and quicksync) 6 IronWolf 4TB NAS drives The 6 drives are in RaidZ2 so give 16TB usable space, and at full pelt the max power consumption is 60W for everything.

mynameisvlad 4y ago
My R730 averages at around 100-200W with two 12-core CPUs, 128GB RAM and 8 12-14TB drives. Servers are more efficient than people give them credit for. It's close to a gaming PC in electricity usage. Certainly not 60W (or what people can get with NUCs and RPi clusters) but for the power I get, it's very much worth it.
- TylerE 4y ago
  I'd guess the issue isn't so much peak consumption but idle.
- happyopossum 4y ago
  If we average that out to 150W, that'd be 1250-1300Kwh/yr. Current Bay Area electric prices means that'd cost in excess of $500/yr to run. I'd say that servers are not more efficient than people are giving them credit for...
  - mynameisvlad 4y ago
    And at Seattle prices, that's $150, so I don't exactly see what the purpose of your anecdote is other than to mention how pricy your electricity is. Edit: But even at $500, that's pretty much the price of a low-spec VPS or VM per year. So for a fairly low initial price to buy the server, you're getting far more performance for the same price you'd pay someone else to use theirs.
  - manfre 4y ago
    Servers are more efficient when fully utilized. A commercial grade server in a homelab is more likely to idle all the time, making it very energy wasteful. Servers need to be right-sized, instead of "more is better".

spurgu 4y ago

Well the electricity prices (according to the article) rose 55% in Germany and 83% in Finland, while the server prices are just going up by 10%, so electricity is just a part of it.

iforgotpassword 4y ago

Don't use a "server" server, unless you really need that. Use a desktop from a few years ago, from some oem who advertises power efficiency. Stuff it full of hdds and ram. I've made very good experiences with Fujitsu. The power consumption figures they publish in their energy consumption white papers has been matching my measurements very well, so you can check ebay for used machines that match your performance/price expectations and then google eg "p920 energy white paper" and check the pdf. (Note, some models are available with different PSUs, ie 90+ and 85+.) My "home server" mostly idles at 14W with one hdd running, one in standby and one ssd.

lillecarl 4y ago
This is the way. You don't need high density at home (usually) so don't pay the price for it. Get a mobo with ECC ram that fits an ATX case if you want server grade stuff. If you don't use stupid tech like VMware it won't eat your resources either (not that VMware is bad in a datacenter, but it is quite resource hungry in comparison to virt-manager or Proxmox). I mean unless databases or Java are your favorite things in the world. Configure power saving as well, that way your CPU really doesn't consume a lot.
- mistrial9 4y ago
  > mobo with ECC ram that fits an ATX case yes, and careful choice of graphics card; GPU computing is special purpose and can be costly in an urban area
  - lillecarl 4y ago
    Indeed, I don't know how dense the megascalers build, it looks less dense than what I see at work compared to the few videos that are out there.
npteljes 4y ago
Same conclusion here. Initially I used an old notebook with USB cases for full-size HDDs, nowadays it'n an older desktop PC in a midi tower, with some extra memory and HDDs. Idle power is <20W, which is most of the time. I really wanted a proper server for the cool factor, but it's just so expensive to maintain.

amelius 4y ago

As a rule of thumb, 1W costs about $1 per year.

difflens 4y ago

I've been wondering over the past few months if we can build a "public" cloud. I have some old machines gathering dust, I'm sure others do too. Is it feasible to build an ad-hoc network of such computers where the compute power is rented out. For ex: I can connect my old lenovo i5 laptop to this network for 6hrs a day and charge 1.2x my electricy cost. Sort of like on demand EC2 instances, but backed by torrent like tech. It'd make computers pay for themselves over time

kappuchino 4y ago

In order to keep my eletricity bill for a running system in my apartment to then minimum I researched the specs & prices from the "The Power Consumption Database"[1] and found an intel nuc running on 5watts idle. Thats the same class of power consumption of a raspi 4 8GB, but easier to maintain. Now I'm waiting for my a Coral TPU USB-Accelarator to keep the peak consumption down for some recognition tasks in homeassistant. [1]http://www.tpcdb.com/list.php?type=13 http://www.tpcdb.com/list.php?type=13