how much is your power bill when you run servers at home?

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timreichhart

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Feb 22, 2009
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Hey Guys
I just wanted to know how much you guys pay for electric when you run your servers from home? my avg electric bill is around 75 dollars a month.
 
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Well as far as power goes it wouldn't be any different then a normal PC really. Depending on how serious you go the $ goes up.

Most of my stuff I try to use lower power parts to help curve it.

My gaming PC uses up way more power then my servers do tho.


Sorry I don't really know exact #'s tho
 
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It really depends on your builds. My i7 with two video cards running dnetc sucks down a lot of power. My FreeNAS uses an Intel board with almost everything integrated, the unnecessary components disabled, a single WD Green drive, and lots of power-saving options. Even with three open drive bays, I can't even hear it running unless I put my ear inside the opening. I'm sure it's not using all that much electricity.

My cousin got a retired Dell PowerVault 750N NAS from work. It doubled his electric bill from $100 to $200 for the month he had it running. Rackmount enterprise servers are designed to be run in a datacenter packed in with a bunch of other servers, and are configured for that environment. They can't fit big fans, so they have lots of fast, tiny ones. They're generally set up for performance rather than power-saving, so sleep modes and such may be disabled. Even just tweaking the setup of the same PC components (different case with fewer/slower fans, enabling power-saving options, etc.) can lead to a big reduction in electricity usage.
 
Depending on what you're classifying "server" you can expect a minimum of about $50 per unit. When I had a server plus three workstations folding all day long my electric bill was around $220 per month. When I started turning everything off at night and when I was working during the day my bill dropped to $90. YMMV
 
Depends on the power draw/your power rates.

In CA, I can expect about 40-60usd a month, based on a 80W mail server.
 
I looked through my records... my highest electric bill I've had this year was in August @ $164

This includes:

1. AC ( I live in south texas, think about it )
2. 2 gaming PCs (they are on 8 - 10 hours a day)(not always in use but on)
3. WHS 24/7 in Norco 4020 - Rackmount
4. Game Server 24/7 - Rackmount
5. XP Machine 24/7 - Rackmount remote desktop for a friend to "play" with he's a bit off sometimes...
6. Normal appliances + chest freezer


so either we have really good rates in the area... or my systems use really low power

none of my systems go to stand-by or hibernate
 
Really depends on the physical specs of the "server"...are you running dual quad core Xeons and a half dozen SCSI drives, with a server that's cranking busy? Or just a desktop PC or NAS box or desktop PC running server stuff?

And is it cranking 24x7x365?

The difference here is huge...from desktop PC with light load adding say 10-15 bucks per month...so a full blown high horsepower server with CPUs pegged all the time doing Folding or something..tacking on at least another 50-75 bucks per month.
 
Where I live power is cheap so to run my Sempron server for 1 month it costs under $5, and under $20 if I left everything on in my room for a month.
 
I live in Massachusetts..
Last bill = $85

Includes:
2x LCD 37" TV's, 3x Desktop Computers, 1x Laptop, 16K BTU A/C, and a
1U Server
 
It might be more helpful if you guys posted your kWh rates along with your costs, energy prices can vary and the smallest difference can make a big difference :)
 
the highest I paid was like 98 dollars because I was running:

2 ac's for couple hours
2 servers
2 desktop computers
1 smoothwall router

see with my servers I am just using a old desktop computers that have 350w power supplies.
 
Some of you people make me sick. I live in Houston. I can easily get over $300 a month in July, August, and September. My computers are negligible when the AC is running all the time. Plus the only things I don't shutdown are my WHS and my networking gear. HTPC's and my desktop get shutdown when not in use.
 
Lightworker said:
It might be more helpful if you guys posted your kWh rates along with your costs, energy prices can vary and the smallest difference can make a big difference :)
Click to expand...

Base cost (changes) + fees + (tier 1) + (tier 2) + (tier 3) = total electric bill.
Yeah... we Californians have some pretty messed up prices.
 
My electric bill is $300+. This is with a fileserver, ESX server, NAS, Cisco 3725, Cisco 3560G, some laptops and the AC at ~76 during the day and ~73 at night.

I don't know what the energy cost is here, but I know it's really expensive.
 
My water/sewer/electric is all on one bill.

My highest bill was $175. My wife freaked out at me until I showed her that the city increased electricity.

I have also converted my whs box to an atom 330 from a pentium d. I also swapped out my 95w amd cpu/mobo for a 65w c2d with esit. Hoping to save some bucks. Also shut down my desktop, and, decommisioned my htpc box.

Ugh.
 
on my electric bill my rate is "EL RATE 141" per KWH then they attach more fees like "distribution charge',"transmission ralated charges", "generation charge", new one was "generation rider" so all these extra fees is for so they can make there profit lol.
 
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