In many European countries electricity is quite expensive. In the U.K. for example, running 20 watts nonstop for a year will cost you around $65 on a typical tariff. If you have more than one home server the savings can quickly add up.

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bjackman 2 days ago | parent [-]

Also 20W is fairly low for idle draw right? Like I think you can get proper machines down that low if you know what to look for but most stuff bigger than a mini PC is gonna be drawing 40+? I might be slightly miscalibrated though.

Anyway it's not about the money for me it's any the aesthetics. Burning power for nothing is yucky.

Edit: just been Googling around. OP is running one of these HP mini PCs. They are pretty efficient! Some go well below 10W. So yeah I would say for the specific use case it's unlikely to matter very much. But still it's a useful thing to be able to do in general.

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zbrozek 2 days ago | parent [-]

My home server is a pig and draws about 100 watts idle.

	▲	bjackman 2 days ago \| parent [-]
		You should try running powertop on it. It will scrape sysfs and look for things that seem misconfigured, and suggest changes to fix them. On one of my machines it enabled some peripheral power saving mode that made a pretty dramatic saving! (I also heard that it sometimes suggests power saving modes that are usually switched off for a good reason, like apparently you really don't want some USB controllers going into certain sleep modes as they take seconds to come back).