I wonder if my system is good or bad. My server needs 0.1kWh.
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Mate, kWh is a measure of electricity volume, like gallons is to liquid. Also, 100 watt hours would be a much more sensical way to say the same thing. What you’ve said in the title is like saying your server uses 1 gallon of water. It’s meaningless without a unit of time. Watts is a measure of current flow (pun intended), similar to a measurement like gallons per minute.
For example, if your server uses 100 watts for an hour it has used 100 watt hours of electricity. If your server uses 100 watts for 100 hours it has used 10000 watts of electricity, aka 10kwh.
My NAS uses about 60 watts at idle, and near 100w when it’s working on something. I use an old laptop for a plex server, it probably uses like 50 watts at idle and like 150 or 200 when streaming a 4k movie, I haven’t checked tbh. I did just acquire a BEEFY network switch that’s going to use 120 watts 24/7 though, so that’ll hurt the pocket book for sure. Soon all of my servers should be in the same place, with that network switch, so I’ll know exactly how much power it’s using.
kWh is a unit of energy, not power
I was really confused by that and that the decided units weren’t just in W (0.1 kW is pretty weird even)
Wh shouldn’t even exist tbh, we should use Joules, less confusing
Watt hours makes sense to me. A watt hour is just a watt draw that runs for an hour, it’s right in the name.
Maybe you’ve just whooooshed me or something, I’ve never looked into Joules or why they’re better/worse.
Joules (J) are the official unit of energy. 1W=1J/s. That means 1Wh=3600J or that 1J is kinda like “1 Watt second”. You’re right that Wh is easier since everything is rated in Watts and it would be insane to measure energy consumption by seconds. Imagine getting your electric bill and it says you’ve used 3,157,200,000J.
3,157,200,000J
Or just 3.1572GJ.
Which apparently is how this Canadian natural gas company bills its customers: https://www.fortisbc.com/about-us/facilities-operations-and-energy-information/how-gas-is-measured
I guess it wouldn’t make sense to measure energy used by gas-powered appliances in Wh since they’re not rated in Watts. Still, measuring volume and then converting to energy seems unnecessarily complicated.
Thanks for the explainer, that makes a lot of sense.
At least in the US, the electric company charges in kWh, computer parts are advertised in terms of watts, and batteries tend to be in amp hours, which is easy to convert to watt hours.
Joules just overcomplicates things.
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I did a physics degree and am comfortable with Joules, but in the context of electricity bills, kWh makes more sense.
All appliances are advertised in terms of their Watt power draw, so estimating their daily impact on my bill is as simple as multiplying their kW draw by the number of hours in a day I expect to run the thing (multiplied by the cost per kWh by the utility company of course).
Wow, the US education system must be improved.
I pay my electric bill by the kWh too, and I don’t live in the US. When it comes to household and EV energy consumption, kWh is the unit of choice.
1J is 3600Wh.
No, if you’re going to lecture people on this, at least be right about facts. 1W is 1J/s. So multiply by an hour and you get 1Wh = 3600J
That’s literraly the same thing,
It’s not literally the same thing. The two units are linearly proportional to each other, but they’re not the same. If they were the same, then this discussion would be rather silly.
but the name is less confusing because people tend to confuse W and Wh
Finally, something I can agree with. But that’s only because physics is so undervalued in most educational systems.
Do you regularly divide/multiply by 3600? That’s not something I typically do in my head, and there’s no reason to do it when everything is denominated in watts. What exactly is the benefit?
Wasn’t it stated for the usage during November? 60kWh for november. Seems logic to me.
Edit: forget it, he’s saying his server needs 0.1kWh which is bonkers ofc
Only one person here has posted its usage for November. The OP has not talked about November or any timeframe.
Yeah misxed up pists, thought one depended on another because it was under it. Again forget my post :-)
Idles at around 24W. It’s amazing that your server only needs .1kWh once and keeps on working. You should get some physicists to take a look at it, you might just have found perpetual motion.
.1kWh is 100Wh
This is a factual but irrelevant statement
Good point. Now it does make sense. I know the secret to the perpetual motion machine now.
I ate sushi today.
I came here to tell my tiny Raspberry pi 4 consumes ~10 watt, But then after noticing the home server setup of some people and the associated power consumption, I feel like a child in a crowd of adults 😀
I’m using an old laptop with the lid closed. Uses 10w.
All in, including my router, switches, modem, laptop, and NAS, I’m using 50watts +/- 5.
It does everything I need, and I feel like that’s pretty efficient.
I have an old desktop downclocked that pulls ~100W that I’m using as a file server, but I’m working on moving most of my services over to an Intel NUC that pulls ~15W. Nothing wrong with being power efficient.
Quite the opposite. Look at what they need to get a fraction of what you do.
Or use the old quote, “they’re compensating for small pp”
we’re in the same boat, but it does the job and stays under 45°C even under load, so I’m not complaining
Between 50W (idle) and 140W (max load). Most of the time it is about 60W.
So about 1.5kWh per day, or 45kWh per month. I pay 0,22€ per kWh (France, 100% renewable energy) so about 9-10€ per month.
Are you including nuclear power in renewable or is that a particular provider who claims net 100% renewable?
Net 100% renewable, no nuclear. I can even choose where it comes from (in my case, a wind farm in northwest France). Of course, not all of my electricity come from there at all time, but I have the guaranty that renewable energy bounds equivalent to my consumption will be bought from there, so it is basically the same.
Thanks. I buy Vattenfall but make net 2/3rds of my own power via rooftop solar.
0.1kWh per hour? Day? Month?
What’s in your system?
Computer with gpu and 50TB drives. I will measure the computer on its own in the enxt couple of days to see where the power consumption comes from
You are misunderstanding the confusion, Kwh is an absolute measurement of an amount of power, not a rate of power usage. It’s like being asked how fast your car can go and answering it can go 500 miles. 500 miles per hour? Per day? Per tank? It doesn’t make sense as an answer.
Does your computer use 100 watt hours per hour? Translating to an average of 100 watts power usage? Or 100 watt hours per day maybe meaning an average power use of about 4 watts? One of those is certainly more likely but both are possible depending on your application and load.
You’re adding to the confusion.
kWh (as in kW*h) and not kW/h is for measurement of energy.
Watt is for measurement of power.They said kilawatt hours per how, not kilawatts per hour.
kWh/h = kW
The h can be cancelled, resulting in kW. They’re technically right, but kWh/h shouldn’t ever be used haha.
Lol thank you, I knew that I don’t know why I wrote it that way, in my defense it was like 4 in the morning.
Yeah but tbh it’s understandable that OP got confused. I think he just means 100W
He might, but he also might mean that he has a power meter that is displaying Kwh since last reset and he plugged it in and then checked it again later when it was all set up after an arbitrary time period and it was either showing the lowest non-zero value it was capable of displaying or was showing a number from several hours.
Which GPU? How many drives?
Put a kill-o-watt meter on it and see what it says for consumption.
My server rack has
- 3x Dell R730
- 1x Dell R720
- 2x Cisco Catalyst 3750x (IP Routing license)
- 2x Netgear M4300-12x12f
- 1x Unifi USW-48-Pro
- 1x USW-Agg
- 3x Framework 11th Gen (future cluster)
- 1x Protectli FE4B
All together that draws… 0.1 kWh… in 0.327s.
In real time terms, measured at the UPS, I have a running stable state load of 900-1100w depending on what I have at load. I call it my computationally efficient space heater because it generates more heat than is required for my apartment in winter except for the coldest of days. It has a dedicated 120v 15A circuit
Good lord, how much does electricity cost where you are? Combined with the air conditioning to keep the space livable, that would be prohibitively expensive for me
It’s always wild reading the power draw people wrote here.
I knew it was because this is a US & Europe centric site and many people from homelabs actually run Enterprise size rigs, but my 4 member household run on 2kW for the entire house lol and 75℅ of that is just A/C we use at night.
On cold winter days, we can average 6kW over 24h, but peak is more like 10 I’d 13. Not talking just about my space heaters with embedded computing power and TBs of storage, but the whole household.
My household of 7 averages 900 watts year-round.
Yeah it’s a bit of a chonk. I don’t remember the exact itemization on the power bill and I don’t have one in front of me.
45 to 55 watt.
But I make use of it for backup and firewall. No cloud shit.
For the whole month of November. 60kWh. This is for all my servers and network equipment. On average, it draws around 90 watt.
How you measuring this? Looks very neat.
Shelly plug, integrated into Home Assistant.
Looks like home assistant
17W for an N100 system with 4 HDD’s
Which HDDs? That’s really good.
Seagate Ironwolf “ST4000VN006”
I do have some issues with read speeds but that’s probably networking related or due to using RAID5.
That’s pretty low with 4 HDD’s. One of my servers use 30 watts. Half of that is from the 2 HDD’s in it.
@meldrik @qaz I’ve got a bunch of older, smaller drives, and as they fail I’m slowly transitioning to much more efficient (and larger) HGST helium drives. I don’t have measurements, but anecdotally a dual-drive USB dock with crappy 1.5A power adapter (so 18W) couldn’t handle spinning up two older drives but could handle two HGST drives.
Is there a (Linux) command I can run to check my power consumption?
Get a Kill-a-Watt meter.
Or smart sockets. I got multiple of them (ZigBee ones), they are precise enough for most uses.
If you have a server with out-of-band/lights-out management such as iDRAC (Dell), iLO (HPe), IPMI (generic, Supermicro, and others) or equivalent, those can measure the server’s power draw at both PSUs and total.
If you have a laptop/something that runs off a battery,
upower
With everything on, 100W but I don’t have my NAS on all the time and in that case I pull only 13W since my server is a laptop
Around 18-20 Watts on idle. It can go up to about 40 W at 100% load.
I have a Intel N100, I’m really happy about performance per watt, to be honest.
My server uses about 6-7 kWh a day, but its a dual CPU Xeon running quite a few dockers. Probably the thing that keeps it busiest is being a file server for our family and a Plex server for my extended family (So a lot of the CPU usage is likely transcodes).
last I checked with a kill-a-watt I was drawing an average of 2.5kWh after a week of monitoring my whole rack. that was about three years ago and the following was running in my rack.
- r610 dual 1kw PSU
- homebuilt server Gigabyte 750w PSU
- homebuilt Asus gaming rig 650w PSU
- homebuilt Asus retro(xp) gaming/testing rig 350w PSU
- HP laptop as dev env/warmsite ~ 200w PSU
- Amcrest NVR 80w (I guess?)
- HP T610 65w PSU
- Terramaster F5-422 90w PSU
- TP-Link TL-SG2424P 180w PSU
- Brocade ICX6610-48P-E dual dual 1kw PSU
- Misc routers, rpis, poe aps, modems(cable & 5G) ~ 700w combined (cameras not included, brocade powers them directly)
I also have two battery systems split between high priority and low priority infrastructure.
Ugh, I need to get off my ass and install a rack and some fiber drops to finalize my network buildout.
would love to add more fiber to my diet! if I had the time and money. next four years is going to get pricy so I’m solidifying my stack now with backup hardware and planning for failures.
the brocade is running my pvt lan since it’s the most important. physically cut off public access. just upgraded most my servers to use 10gbe and would love to run fiber to my office about 60-70 feet away.
the brocade I’m using was unlocked by the eBay seller I got it from, so it can theoretically transfer up to 40g. would be great for my AI rig I keep in the office.
I was drawing an average of 2.5kWh after a week of monitoring my whole rack
That doesn’t seem right; that’s only ~18W. Each one of those systems alone will exceed that at idle running 24/7. I’d expect 1-2 orders of magnitude more.
IDK, after a week of runtime it told me 2.5kwh average. could be average per hour?
Highest power bill I ever saw was summer of 2022. $1800. temps outside were into to 110-120 range and was the hottest ever here.
maybe I’ll hook it back up, but I’ve got different (newer) hardware now.
after a week of runtime it told me 2.5kwh average. could be average per hour
If it gives you kWh as a measure for power, you should toss it because it’s obviously made by someone who had no idea what they were doing.
