I got out of the homelab game as I finished my transition from DevOps to Engineering Lead, and it was simply massively overbuilt for what I actually needed. I replaced an ancient Dell R700 series, R500 series, and a couple supermicros with 3 old desktop PCs in rack enclosures and cut my electric bill nearly $90/month.

Fuckin nutty how much juice those things tear through.

Yeah it kinda puts it all into perspective when you think of how every home used to use 60-watt light bulbs all throughout. Most people just leave lights on all over their home all day, probably using hundreds of watts of electricity. Makes me realize my 35-65w laptop is pretty damn efficient haha

Your googling gave results that were likely accurate for California 4-5 years ago. My average cost per kWh is about 60 cents.

Rates have gone up enormously because the cost of wildfires is falling on ratepayers, not the utility owners.

Regulated monopolies are pretty great, aren’t they? Heads I win, tales you lose.

The US average hasn't been that low in a few years; according to [0] it's 17.47¢/kWh, and significantly higher in some parts of the country (40+ in Hawaii). And the US has low energy costs relative to most of the rest of the world, so a 3-5x multiplier over that for other countries isn't unreasonable. Plus, energy prices are currently rising and will likely continue to do so over the next few years.

$50/month for 100W continuous usage isn't totally mad, and that could climb even higher over the rest of the decade.

Not OP, but my California TOU rates are between a 40 and 70 cents per kWh.

Still only $50/month, not $150, but I very much care about 100W loads doing no work.

That also depends on the country you live.

The EU (and maybe China?) have been regulating standby power consumption, so most of my appliances either have a physical off switch (usually as the only switch) or should have very low standby power draw.

I don't have the equipment to measure this myself.

By "off" you mean, functionally disabled but with whatever auto-update system in the background with all the radios on for "smart home" reasons - or, "off"?

but then you’d turn it off, if you don’t then cloud is much more expensive too.

Also $150 for 100w is crazy, thats like $1.70 per kWh; it would cost about $150 a year at the (high) rates of southern Sweden.

> The homelab group on Reddit is full of people who don't understand any of this - they have full racks in their house that could be replaced with one high-end desktop.

A lot of that group is making use of the IO capabilities of these systems to run lots of PCI-E devices & hard drives. There's not exactly a cost-effective modern equivalent for that. If there were cost-effective ways to do something like take a PCI-E 5.0 x2 and turn it into a PCI-E 3.0 x8 that'd be incredible, but there isn't really. So raw PCI-E lane count is significant if you want cheap networking gear or HBAs or whatever, and raw PCI-E lane count is $$$$ if you're buying new.

Also these old systems mean cheap RAM in large, large capacities. Like 128GB RAM to make ZFS or VMs purr is much cheaper to do on these used systems than anything modern.

Most of the workloads that people with homelabs run, could be run on a 5 year old i5.

A lot of business are paying obscene money to cloud providers when they could have a pair of racks and the staff to support it.

Unless you're paying attention to the bleeding edge of the server market, to its costs (better yet features and affordability) this sort of mistake is easy to make.

The article is by someone who does this sort of thing for fun, and views/attention, and im glad for it... it's fun to watch. But it's sad when this same sort of misunderstanding happens in professional settings, and it happens a lot.