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Comment by mrheosuper | Hacker News Reader

Don't forget the electricity cost come with home server. A quick math will show that it's not insignificant

> Don't forget the electricity cost come with home server. A quick math will show that it's not insignificant

If you run it 24/7 on a dedicated desktop with decent idle (i.e. no high power video card, low power CPU), it likely uses ~ 50W average. That gives an estimate of 0.05kW24hr30 = 36kWh, which would be in the range of $12/month at current australian electricity prices. If you have bad idle power usage (or somehow mostly active not idle), maybe you'd be looking at twice that. But for OP who was spending $xxx/month on subscriptions, it's a pretty negligible cost. If you really want to save this too, raspPi can do a lot of home server needs nowadays

An N100 minipc or second-hand Dell Optiplex doesn't cost too much more than a rasp-Pi ($100-200), has a lot more power, and will only pull about 10W idle.

My optiplex shows as 8.191 kwh last month -> 11w average.

Unless you've got a decent amount of rooftop solar. I haven't paid an electricity bill in four years.

Those HDD will quickly add to total power consumptions

OP was trying to replace streaming services, so he gonna need storage. Assuimg he had 3 hdd for raid 5, that is another 15*3 = 45w

Looking at a WD spec sheet, it's more like 6-7W during read/write, and 3-4W during idle (1W sleep). Assume your use spread however you want, but that would be a max average of 5W usage per drive, so another 5-20W depending on your storage needs.

And while it heats your home in the winter, it also puts more strain on your A/C in the summer.

There are also noise and light pollution issues if it's near a bedroom.

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