Usually around 3.5w.
Lenovo mq80 running immich, nextcloud, journiv, vikunja.
this post was submitted on 13 Oct 2026
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Averages 50-70 watts. Includes my main NUC NAS thing and all of my networking equipment.
My empire of dirt is basically nothing. I'm using low powered computers, mostly fanless. The watt meter on the main power bar is like 15W.
~500 watts continuous.
7 or 8w idle for the server. Comes to about 10eur per year. I couldn't justify using more without feeling like a hypocrite who also advocates for energy conservation.
Nice
What hardware are you running?
11th gen i3 NUC, headless Debian.
My NAS/home server takes about 180 kWH/year, or 20W on average (costs me about 5 Euro/month). This feels like a lot to me and makes up a good chunk of my total energy usage.
What I did to optimize it is mostly select a "low-power" x86 platform, and limit the number of disks. I also decided not to use TrueNAS because it couldn't let the disks from going to sleep.
The machine hosts 10 TB of usable storage (+RAID 1), syncthing, immich, file server, Influx DB, Grafana, and a few other services.
Yeah I use Unraid for multiple reasons but being able to spin down disks when not in use was a big factor. I have 6 mechanical drives totalling 56TB of usuable storage so it was important to me they don't all need to be on at the same time. TrueNAS also comes with some other headaches, I like being able to drop in whatever disk I need to for expansion or replacement.
I like being able to drop in whatever disk I need to for expansion or replacement.
I didn't move that far away (to Debian + ZFS), so that limitation still remains. Although the addition of Raid-Z expansion should alleviate things quite a bit.
That's the one thing I don't like about Truenas. It technically can spin down disks, but there's no way to force them. You can set the idle timer to 5 minutes, but then it constantly spins them back up again. Now I just power the entire system down with home assistant outside of the usage hours and I can power it up again with home assistant using wake on Lan.
A bit goofy, but it works for me
I think for me spin-down was working initially. But then I added some Docker containers and those could only be run on the HDDs, blocking spin down. With Debian I just put the containers on the smaller SSD, allowing the HDDs to spin down.
the theoretical maximum is 20w, the average is around 5w. its a raspberry pi and some old hdd
Around 1000-1200 watt continuously. Still our electricity cost is less then 0.
Anyway my old 11gen dell power edge servers cause the biggest power draw. But I am not ready to upgrade them due to the current memory shortage.
I can't believe I'm the lowest power draw at 50w. I thought that was pretty high.
That includes all my network hardware, my NAS, and my server. Basically everything that is "always on"
All these people saying 500, 600, 700+ watts - it's almost hard to believe. My "gaming" computer, with two monitors, peaks around 400W on graphics-heavy games, and the monitors are like 120 of that. I suppose, though, if you're running a server-class CPU, a half dozen HDDs, and a GPU for continuous transcoding or mining, the it wouldn't be too hard to get there.
I run a dozen containers on an N100 with a couple of HDDs, VOIP device, router & cable modem on 63W, and I've considered that a pretty fair deal for a home lab. Of course, that only serves the household - nothing really offered to the public.
My rack server uses 150W idle. Granted that's 2 processors and 48 cores, 256GB ram, and 8 case fans that you can't cycle less than 35% even though they don't need to be anywhere near that high.
I mean, my phone charges at 60W. Granted, it's not charging 24/7 but 50W is pretty good indeed.
Way too damn much, around 700w between 4 rack servers and associated gear
Wow, that's quite a bit.
If I recall right off hand it's 92 cores, 64+8+8+12 between them. Been looking to merge a couple of the smaller ones into the others but it's not a small task.
I'm actually up at 1am because the two servers I brought online pushed my usage to around 1200W and it was too much for my UPS plus solar battery setup to keep up with. Also I just discovered that my power cable was too high a gauge and it melted to the extension cord, so I had to pry it apart with a screwdriver. Oops.
At full tilt I pull around 2500 watts, but I haven't been fully up and running in months because I haven't had enough available circuits in my panel. Just upgraded my home service to 400a so I should be able to run some new outlets this weekend.
Mine draws around 15-20 watts. I'm mostly using low-power hardware: a Rock 5b as my main server, a 2tb nvme ssd, a 2tb hdd and a Glinet travel router (fine since i live in an apartment).
late but i think i lose the thread. The entire house runs at slightly over 1.5kW, and self hosted equipment accounts around 1.2kW of that. The daily cost is only about £2 though due to solarand batteries.
40 watts normal up to 60 watts. That includes modem and router. PC is fanless system.
Most of my stuff lives on a cheap hetzner vps so that power is someone else's problem lol. at home it's a raspberry pi that's always on (a few watts) and a bitaxe miner doing about 19W, that's around 14 kWh a month, like 3 euros here. the gaming pc is the only hungry thing and it stays off, the pi wakes it with wake-on-lan when I actually need it. took me a while to get the bios settings right (erp off, power on by pci-e) but it was worth it.
is mining worth it for you?
money wise no, not even close. it's a bitaxe gamma doing around 1 TH/s solo, so it's basically a lottery ticket, the odds of hitting a block are tiny. it costs me like 3 euros a month in power so I treat it as a toy, I like checking the best difficulty it found and it's a nice way to learn how mining works
NAS sits at 24w idle. Security cams are drawing 19w of poe power, but I suspect there is a bit more being used in total. I have another NUC using probably around 24w max.
I'll slap some power meters on the switches and main nuc and try get some more accurate numbers.
65W for
- two Lenovo tiny proxmox nodes, each with nvme + SATA SSD + second NIC
- two switches (5/8 port)
- PCengine APU running OpnSense
- Raspi4 with Zigbee antenna
- Mini PC + JBOD (4 SSD in total)
- Small OpenDTU device
Keeping power consumption low was my design goal, but I eventually added the secondary NICs and additional switch for Proxmox replication and management traffic.
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Used to be 200watts bang on but the latest round of updates bumped it up to 210Watts. Everything is on a UPS and I pull measurements from that into an RRD DB (because I like to make my own stuff). It's kinda cool to see how heavy disk use or CPU intense tasks will increase power draw by up to 50W, or some times or when the power drops off sharply I know my NVR container is not working because 6 ffmpeg tasks all stopped at the same time.
- 1x T330 with 4 disks and 2 dozen services.
- 1x H340 NAS with 2 disks
- 1x PoE switch
- 3x PoE cameras
- 2x Desktop switches
- 1x Desktop router
- 1x Cable Modem
RRD
That's a name I haven't heard in a minute!
I see the rrdtool gallery is still up and my graph is still in there 🤭. (No it's not the Christmas graph, that one's insane.)
I'm using Influx nowadays but maybe I should revisit good old rrdtool for old times' sake.
It seemed like the easiest way to store multiple years of data in a format that wouldn't change or disappear.
I found it super easy to work with as a never-went-to-school programmer (in the rime before claude).
I am using a Raspbery Pi 5 8GB as my NAS & homeserver. It is quick and performant enough while having an idle power draw which is not really noticeable on your electricity bill. Very happy with it.
Around 5kWh/day.
My Biggest Power drain is my homeserver/hypervisor/nas/whatever (5600G, 64gb ram, 9xHDD) which uses around 3.5kWh.
Wifi is provided by 2x Extreme Networks WS-AP3825i and 2x Ubiquiti UniFi 6 Plus which total to around 660W/h.
My Router is a small dual-nic shuttle pc with a Pentium G4560 drawing like 310W/h
Switching is done by an Aruba 2930F-24G-4SFP+ Switch that consumes 490W/h
I could probably squeeze out a few more watts if I replace the HDD's with higher density ones and virtualise my router but I really dont feel like doing that right now..
My server is a OnePlus5T running Post marketOS. It runs AdGuardHime, a Static Website, nginx, and Anubis.
The NAS itself probably takes most of the power, which isnt logged. My server is a Raspberry Pi 5, so used 1.86kWh in September.
My budget is under 100w for 3 servers with a combined 18tb of ssd and 28tb of spinning rust that stays spun down unless I need to so a cold backup.
I’m drawing 4.474kWh per day on average, and drew 139 kWh over the last month.
I have EcoFlow batteries on both A and B PDUs.
Stuff that can be powered off (mining, redundant power supplies) gets the wall outlet feeding ups b and pdu B turned off at 4pm and turned back on at 9pm to align with my time of use rate plan.
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Like 3-12w but I'm only running a little mostly jellyfin server
5 w for the machine. I think the router is 20w.
Around 90 Watts for modem, server (which includes router VM), network switch and access point. It runs on solar most of the time
About 300-400 watts. I should put it on a smart plug to track it over time. I have a NAS with 16 HDDs, an outdated super overkill switch that I should replace to save some power, and a few old laptops.
It also might use some more power while transcoding for my PeerTube Instance or Jellyfin, and I have my desktop set up as a remote runner for the PeerTube Instance, so that uses some additional power.
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homelab running linux mint with about 60 docker containers about 45w, meassured at the socket (2HDD)
About 80 W. I do Folding@Home
Too much.
38watts and spikes to 65watts from my Synology. My gaming laptop turn proxmox can spike to 350watts but normally sits at 50-75watts.
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