In the on-going battle between the fun of the homelab and trying to save some money, I’ve been looking at energy usage more. So I put a smart outlet between the wall and the UPS that holds most of my equipment. I’m seeing faily consistent average of 240W, which ends up being about 15-20% of my total house usage each month. Here is what is all there:
- Juniper EX330P: Powering:
- 4 TP-Link EAP245 APs
- 2 Amcrest IP5M-T1179EW-28MM IP Cameras
- One of those mini, 4 2.5GBe port, no-name PCs (Celeron N5105) running firewall/router
- 2 HP EliteDesk 800 GS Mini (i5-6600 using NVMe drive) - Running Proxmox
- Dell OptiPlex 7050 Micro (I5-6600T using NVMe drive) - Running Windows
- HP Pavilion P6520y (AMD Athlon II 625, PS replaced with Thermaltake Smart 430W) - Running TrueNAS
So I assume the old HP Pavilion machine and the Juniper switch are my two main contributers. I shut down the HP and power dropped to about 160W. Can’t really shut off the Juniper as it will take all the sensors with it.
My questions are:
- Would I really gain enough to outweigh the build costs, by rebuilding the TrueNas machine with something newer like one of the builds here (https://nascompares.com/guide/recommended-jonsbo-n3-nas-builds-for-300-500-1000/)
- Is there something <$150 to replace the Juniper that would still give me PoE, VLAN, and SFP+ ports? Or is the gain there, also not really going to balance out?
You can work this out yourself pretty easily. How much does your electric cost? How much does it cost to run that 80W Pavilion? It’ll be pennies per day. Unlikely that it would make financial sense to upgrade, which is why I still have noisy HP G7s in my rack, cheaper to keep them than upgrade.