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Comment by hocuspocus | Hacker News Reader

> I guess some people around the world have quite cheap utility bills!

Or they work at Google and don't really have to care.

Electricity is not particularly cheap in Switzerland, but not particularly expensive either (nothing like Germany for instance). If running a home lab is your hobby, why not. There are plenty of hobbies that are a lot more expensive.

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The machine's clearly massive overkill for routing. Another commenter points out it typically runs around 50w - and the OP says they're also using it as a server in this thread.

Do you know of any smaller scale hardware capable of routing 25Gbit/s?

EOLd mellanox sx6036 switches can be had for $200 on ebay.

That’s a switch though, not a router OP is building. And I doubt this heavy duty thing uses less power than OPs setup (and we’re taking in a thread complaining about power usage)

I agree. that it uses (relatively) lots of power (and is very noisy). but a managed switch might serve the guys router needs as well. depends what hes trying to do. Most people using a "router" inside the home, can probably get away with a managed switch. But another question was cost, so was trying to address that.

FWIW: raspberry pis (the 4 series) sucks in 15w which is why it’s so bloody difficult to power them through standard USB power adapters (which go up to 12w).

So, not hundreds of times more power hungry, but definitely 2-3x

Just to note that's peak power consumption. They idle between 1-4W, or if you're running a PoE HAT, 4-6W.

A RPi is not equivalent to what most would use as a COTS router, which includes a GbE switch and some kind of modem (DSL or cable). The latter on its own needs a few Watts.

On the contrary, OpenWRT and a good CM4-based board allows the Pi to run pretty well as a gigabit router :)

https://www.jeffgeerling.com/blog/2021/two-tiny-dual-gigabit...

No CM4 and accompanying carrier board needed . A regular RPi4 with a USB3 gigabit adapter makes for a good gigabit home router. I have been using one as my home gigabit router for the last 14 months without any issues.

That’s not much of a router with just two ports and no WiFi.

As another commenter already pointed out, this is peak power consumption. A Pi + external HDD runs me to 12 W max in live use. Less if the drive spins down.

yep, which makes them a pain in the ass to efficiently cool down without active cooling (=fans)

My passively cooled RPi4 with 8GiB RAM + 1GiB/USB ethernet dongle working as a 1Gb router never goes above 50 degrees C (all-metal case from aliexpress).

The problem is running it 24x7, then a small 50w is still 438 Kwh each year. That's more than a 10% increase in yearly use for a typical two person household...

Then like another poster said, it all depends on how much you pay for electricity and some people have quite low cost electricity.

For me that would be a $49 cost per year, or a cost of little over $4 per month.

That's very roughly $100/year, which is < 1/6th of the cost of the _network cards_ in this build.

My workstation bursts to 600w+ for 15-20 minutes at a time when compiling, for comparison.

Now it's up to the person to decide whether increase in living cost is worth it, which... is kinda normal. I think I spend more money on other things that I take enjoyment from.

Sure, it's just that many people don't think about this impact because 50W sounds low.

Maybe having single bulky, but efficient server means other laptops/whatnot will be used less which will cancel out and be electricity negative at the end of the year.

Aren't 60w lightbulbs still around?

Do you run your lightbulbs 24/7?

If so, you should get a LED alternative.

How about people power this stuff with renewalbles like solar?

For developer like me, I'm actually considering this option, it would be great to have PC like this available for some docker stuff as well, ie. MSSQL instance for development (Azure MSSQL version that runs on M1 is shit slow to the point it's unusable for development). Maybe even some tests could be offloaded from dev machine to this one etc. Would be nice to have single place for backups, photo library etc.

Why not just use your development machine for development?

Also, why not use a remote server for deployment, testing, and building docker images? Most roles I have had offer such services (remote servers) as part of their costing so wouldn't cost you time, money, or effort.

I agree that having a single place to backup photos etc, is important. I use an external SSD for such a purpose as imo it's more useful to have it offline as I rarely add data and it is less likely to be comprised, e.g., it my machine was hacked.

>> Why not just use your development machine for development?

He said the M1 versions of MSSQL performs terribly

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