I am smarting up my home with lots of ZigBee thingies and decided to add a ZigBee smart monitor to my selfhost setup.

Its a desktop box with a core i7 9th gen, 48gb ram, no monitor.

I used to have 4xSSD 4TB + 2xHDD 6TB. Three RAID1 for a total of 4+4+6=14Tbs.

Power was sitting at 50W.

I restructured my storage: 1 RAID5 with the 4 SSDs (12tb) and removed the 2 HDDs.

Power went down to 38W!

I am amazed.

In the future will run just 1 hdd for storing backups and keep it spinned down 99% of the time.

PS: the above wattage is during transcoding, so with high CPU and disk usage…

  • ShimitarOP
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    4 days ago

    I missed the business part… That make absolutely sense and gives out a different prospect. Here, you would be able to write off taxes all your home rig expenses I think.

    Yes, factoring in all energy costs (including the public television tax which is part of your utility bills) energy cost me 60€c per kWh.

    We use gas extensively, but for heating I use wood pellets with an idro-stove (heats the water that then circulate in the heaters).

    In summer I can use ac for those nights that doesn’t cool off, but during the day having 50cm thick stone walls never heats up enough inside. Winter are a different story, heating is on from 1 October to 1 of may, and here Home Assistant with per-room ZigBee thermostats and thermovalves is helping a lot to keep the pellet usage down to 2x15kg bags per day when its below freezing outside in daytime.

    Until we upgraded from 3kWh to 6kWh (at nice 300€ price point) we frequently had the power disconnected because the oven was on while drying hairs… Or washer and toaster… What a fun ride.

    3kWh is actually enough only for a condo, not for a house, but still it’s how it works here.

    All my hardware is refurbished from work, got it from surplus or things going to be dismissed. And way overpowered for the services I run (full arr stack, Usenet and torrents, WebDAV and filebrowser sharing, navidrome jellyfin actual budget homepage romm radicale and stuff I surely forgot).

    I even have two ISPs for redundancy because living in the woods make it unreliable, so FWA (5G 300mbps but capped) and FTTC (20 shitty mbps but uncapoed) it is.