I regret building this $3000 Pi AI cluster

It will probably consume $150 worth of electricity in less than a month, even sitting idle :-\

The internet says 100W idle, so maybe more like $40-50 electricity, depending on where you live could be cheaper could be more expensive.

Makes me wonder if I should unplug more stuff when on vacation.

> Makes me wonder if I should unplug more stuff when on vacation.

What's the margin on unplugging vs just powering off?

I was surprised to find out that my apartment pulls 80-100W when everything is seemingly down during the night. A tiny light here and there, several displays in sleep mode, a desktop idling (mere 15W, but), a laptop charging, several phones charging, etc, the fridge switches on for a short moment. The many small amounts add up to something considerable.

By "off" you mean, functionally disabled but with whatever auto-update system in the background with all the radios on for "smart home" reasons - or, "off"?

100W over a month (rule of thumb 730 hours) is 73kWh. Which is $7.30 at my $0.10/kWh rate, or less than $25 at (what Google told me is) Cali’s average $0.30/kWh.

100W continuous at 12¢/kWh (US average) is only ~$9 / month. Is your electricity 5x more expensive than the US average?

Not OP, but my California TOU rates are between a 40 and 70 cents per kWh.

Still only $50/month, not $150, but I very much care about 100W loads doing no work.

The US average hasn't been that low in a few years; according to [0] it's 17.47¢/kWh, and significantly higher in some parts of the country (40+ in Hawaii). And the US has low energy costs relative to most of the rest of the world, so a 3-5x multiplier over that for other countries isn't unreasonable. Plus, energy prices are currently rising and will likely continue to do so over the next few years.

$50/month for 100W continuous usage isn't totally mad, and that could climb even higher over the rest of the decade.

Your googling gave results that were likely accurate for California 4-5 years ago. My average cost per kWh is about 60 cents.

Rates have gone up enormously because the cost of wildfires is falling on ratepayers, not the utility owners.

Regulated monopolies are pretty great, aren’t they? Heads I win, tales you lose.

So shut it off when you don’t need it.

Isn't your home lab supposed to make you learn stuff? Why would you leave it idle?

You wouldn’t, it’s given as a lower bound, it costs more than that when not idling

60 cents per kWh? That’s shocking. Here in Oregon people complain about energy prices and my fully loaded cost (not the per kWh but including everything) is 19c. And I go over the limit for single family residential where I end up in a higher priced bracket. Thanks for making me feel better about my electricity rate. I’m sorry you have to deal with that. The utility companies should have to pay to cover those costs.

Depends entirely on the utilities board doing the regulation.

That said, I'm of the opinion that power/water/internet should all be state/county/city ran. I don't want my utilities companies to have profit motives.

My water company just got bought up by a huge water company conglomerate and, you guessed it, immediate rate increases.

but then you’d turn it off, if you don’t then cloud is much more expensive too.

Also $150 for 100w is crazy, thats like $1.70 per kWh; it would cost about $150 a year at the (high) rates of southern Sweden.

Im not the OP, don’t know how they arrived at that cost.

Personally it’s cheaper to buy the hardware that does spend most of its time idling. Fast turnaround on very large private datasets being key.

Most utilities, even if ostensibly privately-owned, are profit-limited and rates must be approved by a regulatory board. Some are organized as non-profits (rural water and electric co-ops, etc.) This is in exchange for the local monopoly.

If your local regulators approved the merger and higher rates, your complaint is with them as much as the utility company.

Not saying that some regulators are not basically rubber stamps or even corrupt.

Those kWh prices are insane, that’ll make industry move out of there.

They have definitely increased but not all of California is like this. In the heart of Silicon Valley, Santa Clara, it's about $0.15/kWh. Having Data Centers nearby helps, I suppose.

I got out of the homelab game as I finished my transition from DevOps to Engineering Lead, and it was simply massively overbuilt for what I actually needed. I replaced an ancient Dell R700 series, R500 series, and a couple supermicros with 3 old desktop PCs in rack enclosures and cut my electric bill nearly $90/month.

Fuckin nutty how much juice those things tear through.

I agree. The issue really is that they are 3 layers removed from where I can make a change. They are all appointed and not elected which means I (and my neighbors) don't have any recourse beyond the general election. IIRC, they are appointed by the governor which makes it even harder to fix (might be the county commissioner, not 100% on how they got their position, just know it was an appointment).

I did (as did others), in fact, write in comments and complaints about the rate increases and buyout. That went unheard.

Yeah it kinda puts it all into perspective when you think of how every home used to use 60-watt light bulbs all throughout. Most people just leave lights on all over their home all day, probably using hundreds of watts of electricity. Makes me realize my 35-65w laptop is pretty damn efficient haha

Obviously the solution is to pickup another hobby, and enter the DIY solar game at the same time as your home lab obsession :D

I'm guessing the parent is talking about total bill (transmission, demand charges..) $.15/kwH is probably just the usage, and I am very skeptical that's accurate for residential.

CORE energy in Colorado is charging $0.10819 per kWh _today_

https://core.coop/my-cooperative/rates-and-regulations/rate-...

Industrial pays different rates than homes.

That said, I am not sure those numbers are true. I am in California (PG&E with East Bay community generation), and my TOU rates are much lower than those.

Santa Clara's energy rates are an outlier among neighboring municipalities, and should not be used as an example of energy cost in the Bay Area. Santa Clara residents are served by city-owned Silicon Valley Power, which has lower rates than PG&E or SVCE, which service almost all of the South Bay.

Depends on a server. This test got 79W idle for _two socket_ E5 2690-V4 server.

https://www.servethehome.com/lenovo-system-x3650-m5-workhors...

If he’s only paying $50 most of it is connection fees and low usage distorting his per kWh price way up.

That also depends on the country you live.

The EU (and maybe China?) have been regulating standby power consumption, so most of my appliances either have a physical off switch (usually as the only switch) or should have very low standby power draw.

I don't have the equipment to measure this myself.

There are 3 different components of PG&E electricity bills, which makes the bill difficult to read. I am also in PG&E East Bay community generation, and when I look at all components, it’s:

Minimum Delivery Charge (what’s paid monthly, which is largely irrelevant, before annual true-up of NEM charges): $11.69/month

Actual charges, billed annually, per kWh:

  Peak NEM charge: $.62277
  Off-Peak NEM charges: $.31026

Plus 3-20% extra (depending on the month) in “non-bypassable charges” (I haven’t figured out where these numbers come from), then a 7.5% local utility tax.

Those rates do get a little lower in the winter (.30 to .48), and of course the very high rates benefit me when I generate more energy than I consume (which only happens when I’m on vacation). But the marginal all-in costs are just very high.

That’s NEM2 + TOU-EV2A, specifically.

Are you actually able to compute that? With PG&E + MCE because of the way they back off the PG&E generation charges, the actual per-time period rates are not disclosed.

I can solve for them with three equations for three unknowns... but since they change the rates quarterly by the time I know what my exact rates were they have changed.

Interestingly enough it is often times a foundational change in one's 'normal' that inspires something 'new'.

In this case that 'new' is energy efficient software down to the individual lines of code and what their energy cost is on certain hardware. Academics are publishing about it in niche corners of the web and some entrepreneurs are doing it but of course none of this is cool now so we remain a mockery for our objectives. In time this too will become a real thing as many now are just beginning to feel the ever rising costs of energy which is only just starting to increase from decisions made years ago. The worst is yet to come as seen and heard directly from every single expert that has testified in the last years before the Energy and Commerce committee however only the outside-the-boxers among us watch such educational content to better prepare for tomorrow.

Electricity powers our world and nearly all take it for granted, time too will change this thinking.

:D

Correct. $0.15/kwh is usage. There are a few small fees but that’s likely the case in most places. This is residential use. If skeptical, a quick online search is all it takes…

Well the discussion was California as a whole and averages, so I decided to share. As with averages, data is above and bellow the mean, so when a commenter above said $.30/kwh was much too low for California, I decided to lend some support the the argument as I’m in California paying bellow the average. It’s a just a data point. A counter example to the claim made by parent. Maybe it helps fellow nerds pick a spot in the bay if they want to run their homelabs.