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> It burns 450Watts on average To put that into perspective, that's more than my entire household including my server that has an old GPU in it Water heating

by Aachen 1y ago

> It burns 450Watts on average To put that into perspective, that's more than my entire household including my server that has an old GPU in it Water heating is electric yet we still don't use 450W×year≈4MWh of electricity. In winter we just about reach that as a daily average (as a household) because we need resistive heating to supplement the gas system. Constantly 450W is a huge amount of energy for flipping some toggles at home with voice control and streaming video files

tasuki 1y ago
That's also only four and a half incandescent lightbulbs. Not enough to heat your house ;)
- linsomniac 1y ago
  Remember that modern heating and hot water systems have a >1 COP, meaning basically they provide more heat than the input power. Air-sourced heat pumps can have a COP of 2-4, and ground source can have 4-5, meaning you can get around 1800W of heat out of that 450W of power. That's ignoring places like Iceland where geothermal heat can give you effectively free heat. Ditto for water heating, 2-4.5 COP. Modern construction techniques including super insulated walls and tight building envelops, heat exchangers, can dramatically reduce heating and cooling loads. Just saying it's not as outrageous as it might seem.
  - tasuki 1y ago
    > Remember that modern heating and hot water systems have a >1 COP, meaning basically they provide more heat than the input power. Oh for sure! Otherwise we'd be heating our homes directly with electricity. Thanks for putting concrete numbers on it!
aftbit 1y ago
Found the European :) With power as cheap as it is in the US, some of us just haven't had to worry about this as much as we maybe should. My rack is currently pulling 800W and is mostly idle. I have a couple projects in the works to bring this down, but I really like mucking around with old enterprise gear and that stuff is very power hungry. Dell R720 - 125W Primary NAS - 175W Friend's Backup NAS - 100W Old i5 Home Server - 100W Cisco 2921 VoIP router - 80W Brocade 10G switch - 120W Various other old telecom gear - 100W
- Kudos 1y ago
  I care about the cost far less than the environmental impact. I guess that's also a European tell?
  - horsawlarway 1y ago
    Then offsetting that cost to a cloud provider isn't any better. 450W just isn't that much power as far as "environmental costs" go. It's also super trivial to put on solar (actually my current project - although I had to scale the solar system way up to make ROI make sense because power is cheap in my region). But seriously, panels are cheap, LFP batteries are cheap, inverters/mppts are cheap. Even in my region with the cheap power, moving my house to solar has returns in the <15 years range.
    - Aachen 1y ago
      > Then offsetting that cost to a cloud provider isn't any better. Nobody made that claim > 450W just isn't that much power as far as "environmental costs" go It's a quarter of one's fair share per the philosophy of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2000-watt_society https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2000-watt_society If you provide for yourself (e.g. run your IT farm on solar), by all means, make use of it and enjoy it. Or if the consumption serves others by doing wind forecasts for battery operators or hosts geographic data that rescue workers use in remote places or whatnot: of course, continue to do these things. In general though, most people's home IT will fulfil mostly their own needs (controlling the lights from a GPU-based voice assistant). The USA and western Europe have similarly rich lifestyles but one has a more than twice as great impact on other people's environment for some reason (as measured by CO2-equivalents per capita). We can choose for ourselves what role we want to play, but we should at least be aware that our choices make a difference
    - Kudos 1y ago
      > My rack is currently pulling 800W and _is mostly idle_. Emphasis mine. I have a rack that draws 200w continuously and I don't feel great about it, even though I have 4.8kW of panels to offset it.
  - 1y ago
horsawlarway 1y ago
And yet it's far more economical for me than paying for streaming services. A single $30/m bill vs nearly $100/m saved after ditching all the streaming services. And that's not counting the other saas products it replaced... just streaming. Additionally - it's actually not that hard to put this entire load on solar. 4x350watt panels, 1 small inverter/mppt charger combo and a 12v/24v battery or two will do you just fine in the under $1k range. Higher up front cost - but if power is super expensive it's a one time expense that will last a decade or two, and you get to feel all nice and eco-conscious at the same time. Or you can just not run the GPUs, in which case my usage falls back to ~100w. I You can drive lower still - but it's just not worth my time. It's only barely worth thinking about at 450W for me.
- Aachen 1y ago
  I'm not saying it should be cheaper to run this elsewhere, I'm saying that this is a super high power draw for the utility it provides My own server doesn't run voice recognition so I can't speak to that (I can only opine that it can't be worth a constant draw of 430W to get rid of hardware switches and buttons), but my server also does streaming video and replaces SaaS services, so similar to what you mention, at around 20W

by Aachen 1y ago

tasuki 1y ago

That's also only four and a half incandescent lightbulbs. Not enough to heat your house ;)

linsomniac 1y ago
Remember that modern heating and hot water systems have a >1 COP, meaning basically they provide more heat than the input power. Air-sourced heat pumps can have a COP of 2-4, and ground source can have 4-5, meaning you can get around 1800W of heat out of that 450W of power. That's ignoring places like Iceland where geothermal heat can give you effectively free heat. Ditto for water heating, 2-4.5 COP. Modern construction techniques including super insulated walls and tight building envelops, heat exchangers, can dramatically reduce heating and cooling loads. Just saying it's not as outrageous as it might seem.
- tasuki 1y ago
  > Remember that modern heating and hot water systems have a >1 COP, meaning basically they provide more heat than the input power. Oh for sure! Otherwise we'd be heating our homes directly with electricity. Thanks for putting concrete numbers on it!

aftbit 1y ago

Found the European :) With power as cheap as it is in the US, some of us just haven't had to worry about this as much as we maybe should. My rack is currently pulling 800W and is mostly idle. I have a couple projects in the works to bring this down, but I really like mucking around with old enterprise gear and that stuff is very power hungry. Dell R720 - 125W Primary NAS - 175W Friend's Backup NAS - 100W Old i5 Home Server - 100W Cisco 2921 VoIP router - 80W Brocade 10G switch - 120W Various other old telecom gear - 100W

Kudos 1y ago
I care about the cost far less than the environmental impact. I guess that's also a European tell?
- horsawlarway 1y ago
  Then offsetting that cost to a cloud provider isn't any better. 450W just isn't that much power as far as "environmental costs" go. It's also super trivial to put on solar (actually my current project - although I had to scale the solar system way up to make ROI make sense because power is cheap in my region). But seriously, panels are cheap, LFP batteries are cheap, inverters/mppts are cheap. Even in my region with the cheap power, moving my house to solar has returns in the <15 years range.
  - Aachen 1y ago
    > Then offsetting that cost to a cloud provider isn't any better. Nobody made that claim > 450W just isn't that much power as far as "environmental costs" go It's a quarter of one's fair share per the philosophy of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2000-watt_society https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2000-watt_society If you provide for yourself (e.g. run your IT farm on solar), by all means, make use of it and enjoy it. Or if the consumption serves others by doing wind forecasts for battery operators or hosts geographic data that rescue workers use in remote places or whatnot: of course, continue to do these things. In general though, most people's home IT will fulfil mostly their own needs (controlling the lights from a GPU-based voice assistant). The USA and western Europe have similarly rich lifestyles but one has a more than twice as great impact on other people's environment for some reason (as measured by CO2-equivalents per capita). We can choose for ourselves what role we want to play, but we should at least be aware that our choices make a difference
  - Kudos 1y ago
    > My rack is currently pulling 800W and _is mostly idle_. Emphasis mine. I have a rack that draws 200w continuously and I don't feel great about it, even though I have 4.8kW of panels to offset it.
- 1y ago

horsawlarway 1y ago

And yet it's far more economical for me than paying for streaming services. A single $30/m bill vs nearly $100/m saved after ditching all the streaming services. And that's not counting the other saas products it replaced... just streaming. Additionally - it's actually not that hard to put this entire load on solar. 4x350watt panels, 1 small inverter/mppt charger combo and a 12v/24v battery or two will do you just fine in the under $1k range. Higher up front cost - but if power is super expensive it's a one time expense that will last a decade or two, and you get to feel all nice and eco-conscious at the same time. Or you can just not run the GPUs, in which case my usage falls back to ~100w. I You can drive lower still - but it's just not worth my time. It's only barely worth thinking about at 450W for me.

Aachen 1y ago
I'm not saying it should be cheaper to run this elsewhere, I'm saying that this is a super high power draw for the utility it provides My own server doesn't run voice recognition so I can't speak to that (I can only opine that it can't be worth a constant draw of 430W to get rid of hardware switches and buttons), but my server also does streaming video and replaces SaaS services, so similar to what you mention, at around 20W