How much power does your 24/7 kit consume?

N

nry

Limp Gawd
Joined
Jul 10, 2008
Messages
409
Not too sure what electricity prices are like on the other side of the pond, but here in the UK electricity prices are always on the rise. After receiving a shocker of a electricity bill I decided to investigate what power consumption my home kit (also doubles up as my work lab for remote working etc).

My kit which runs 24/7 idles at 310w, I calculate this at roughly £380 per year!! :eek:

This includes the following, have included rough power consumption for each device:

APC 16A Switched PDU - not measured
APC SmartUPS 2200 - 50w when fully charged
HP ProCurve 1800-24G - 19w
Virgin Media 'SmartHub' - 16w
UniFi AP - not measured
Primary ESXi Box - 170w (some HDDs added since measuring)

ESXi Spec:
- Tagan TG480-U01
- Asus P8B-WS
- Xeon 1245
- 32GB DDR3 Ram
- OCZ Agility 3 240GB
- Areca 1882i-8 RAID Controller
- 6x Hitachi 7K3000 3TB Drives
- Intel NC382T Dual Gigabit LAN
- 3x 80mm fans

Anyone else ever gone to the effort of working out what yours uses? I am seriously considering building a underclocked i3 box to run 24/7 and only boot my main box when required!
 
That standard wattage Xeon and the Raid controller is what is eating your power at idle.
 
Yea never really built it to be power efficient, the 6 7200rpm drives probably don't help much either!

Seriously considering a new low power box for the 24/7 usage as the primary use of it is firewall, dns, web server, vps backups
Then I could look at setting my VM environment with a dedicated storage box. Might create a separate thread on that in the future for some advise on it.
 
Thinking my laptops don't take much power at all. I've been desktop-free for a while and my bills are about $10/$20 lower each month because of it.
 
150W

SuperMicro custom Xeon ESX server w/ 16GB
Cisco/Linksys 24port gbit switch
Synology 1812+ w/ 2x 512GB SSD + 4x 3TB WD Green
APC UPS
FTTC modem
 
FreeNAS 37watt average according to my UPS, it's not being hit hard, and I never measured it during heavy work(download)
EVGA Z68 Board
16GBS Corsair DDR3
Intel G850 1155
Silverstone GD07 Case with 4x 120mm fans
6x 3TB WD REDS
2x ICYDOCK 3 in 2 SAS Drive Cages

Still working on it, I have room for 11 3.5" Drives, I fully intend I going Supermicro and IBM SAS card in the future.

ESXi box will be in the works too. As well as an HTPC once I get the chance/money
 
This will give you an idea of what I am running...

Xeon E5-1620 3.6ghz Quad Core/HT idle's at 300mhz (socket 2011) using FreeBSD/ZFS v28 which controls the throttle.
8x 2TB WD Red Drives
Supermicro motherboard
4 80mm cooling fans (Supermicro chassis stuff)
32GB Registered DDR3-1600 RAM
Intel XF-SR 10gb 850nm 10gb/e pci-e 2.0 8x card. Fiber optic.

total draw from APC-SmartUps 1500 is between 98-105 watts at idle.

Something is making me think that your Xeon is not throttling down in frequency under no to low load states. You might want to check your bios settings.

Now on the other hand my signature rig below ... not even fully up to date as shown draws 450-500watts at idle not kidding. It is NOT a 24/7 machine. That figure also includes my 3 Asus IPS displays also. They each draw about 75watts when fully warmed up.

Other gear running as calculated by Cisco docs -- My 1921 router is idling at 24watt and my 3750E is about 50-250watt depending on the load I put on it. Even with 2 ports running at wide open gig transfers the wattage stays around 50ish if I remember.
 
380W, need to reduce this though.

Cable Modem
Cisco ASA5505
Dell 5324 switch
cisco 1142N WAP
HDhome run tuner
file server: 24HDD's + low power 1155 setup
ESXI server: dual 1366 4c/8t CPU's with 72gb ram, 1 HDD
 
Hmm. its been a while since I plugged in the old kilawatt and I have added a ton of stuff.

Primary desktop stays on all the time, pulls 80-90 watts idle, 240 when gaming. It's my media server also, runs tversity, sabnzbd, sickbeard, etc.

I have 3 cisco routers (1841, 1821, 2651xm) and 2 cisco switches (2950 and 3560)

To be honest I stopped watching my electricity usage when I switched providers and now only pay 5c per kilowatt hour.
 
Last I checked my server stuff uses about 350w. Though I was going by the display on the UPS and I since changed to a bigger UPS but it does not have a display. I need to find a way to monitor it on an ongoing basis. I was looking on ebay real quick at ampmeter displays and seems that might be my best bet. I will have one of my server racks mostly dedicated for power related equipment so I can have a display panel in there too perhaps. Would look pretty neat too.

My PC uses around 200w or so, but it's a much higher end machine than my server. A core i7. That's the only downside of upgrading I guess, uses more power. The server I have is a core2quad.
 
I went through and tested each of my components when I finally picked up a kill-a-watt here a while back. I don't have the paper with me, but I would estimate ~100w.

I know my OI server idles right around 70w with an Athlon X4 and 3x2tb Samsungs.
The rest includes a Maxterm 8300 running pfSense, Netgear wgr614 for wireless, Trendnet 8 port gb switch, and HP printer.

Main rig, without the monitor, only comes up at about 40w idle IIRC. Would have liked to get some numbers off of my old 920 rig for comparison, but I didn't have the meter before I sold it. It's amazing how much power LCD monitors draw, especially at higher brightness.
 
Seems I am not the only one with fairly high power kit running at home, makes me feel slightly better haha
 
I haven't got a kill-a-watt meter, but I can estimate that my setup is about 150W:
GS108T-200 -> 10W
WRT610N -> 10W
HP 1800-24G -> 20W
Watchguard x750e with Pentium-M PowerD and PicoPSU -> 25W
HP Microserver with 5 disk (2 green) -> 60W
APC SmartUPS 1500 -> I don't know exactly, I think about 30W
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top