How I cut my homelab power bill by $100
Homelabs are fun and I love mine. However, it was using way more electricity than it needed, and it was costing me more money each month than I was willing to pay. Here are three ways I’ve reduced my homelab’s impact on my monthly electric bill.
I replaced energy-intensive systems with energy-intensive alternatives
This old server seemed like a good idea at first.
Once upon a time, I ran all of my homelab services on a single system: my Lenovo RD440 rackmount server. This works as my NAS running Unraid, and that was all I had in my homelab. Fast forward to February 2025 and I purchased two new servers. Man, I was excited and immediately used them both. One server gave me 27TB of storage, the other had 20 cores, 40 threads and 192GB of RAM plus plenty of NVMe and Rust storage spinning up for virtual machines.
What I didn’t realize, however, was that these two new servers cost more to run per month than they saved me, and by a lot. Once I sat down and realized that my home lab alone was costing almost $100 a month in electricity, I knew something had to change. That’s when I realized I had an “old” desktop computer in the closet that I hadn’t used in a while.
I had an Intel desktop from a previous job lying unused and decided to check it out. It was an i9-13900K with 32GB of DDR4 RAM. Nowadays it’s a gold mine, and when I found it, I thought the same thing. Sure, it wasn’t a 20-core, 40-thread system with 192GB of RAM, but I didn’t really need those specs for the VMs I was running. I simply grabbed 64GB of RAM (for $120…back in the good old days) and migrated my VMs to the new system.
With 96GB of RAM and plenty of native NVMe storage, the new server was actually faster than the old Xeon setup I was using. The best part, though, is that it runs at less than 50W most of the time, whereas the rack-mounted server drew well over 250W most of the time.
This alone reduced my electricity bill by a drastic amount. I also shut down the 27TB storage server because I just wasn’t using it, which saved even more electricity.
Here’s the thing: If I had to go back in time and didn’t have the i9-13900K system in the closet, I would have just sold the Dell servers and bought a mini PC. In comparison, mini PCs consume power while still maintaining enough power to handle the majority of home lab tasks.
The moral of this story is to only use the equipment you need, not what you “want”. I wanted the big rackmount server as a virtual machine system, but it simply cost more than it was worth to run, and I wasn’t fully utilizing it.
- Brand
-
Bee Link
- Processor
-
Ryzen3 3200U
The Beelink SER3 mini PC is the ideal entry-level Windows desktop for small budgets. Featuring a Ryzen 3 3200U processor, this desktop comes with Windows 11 Pro and 16GB of DDR4 RAM. A 500GB SSD comes preinstalled (and is user-upgradable), and you’ll find two HDMI, Ethernet, and four USB-A ports on this compact desktop.
Switching systems allowed me to get rid of my dedicated GPU in favor of an iGPU
Modern iGPUs are actually pretty awesome.
When I only had a single server and when using multiple rack-mounted servers, I had a dedicated graphics card installed for hardware transcoding in Plex. A side benefit that I didn’t expect every time I upgraded to the Intel system was that I could remove the dedicated graphics card. It wasn’t anything crazy, but the card often drew 75W on its own.
Switching to the iGPU in my i9-13900K gave me access to newer, more modern codecs, and also significantly reduced my power consumption. Now my entire VM server uses less power than my dedicated graphics card before.
You may be saying, “But I don’t have access to an i9-13900K!” and that’s completely normal. Unless you’re doing incredibly intense transcoding all the time, opting for a less powerful system, like the Intel N100 or N150, will do just fine for an iGPU. These processors are more than capable of easily transcoding multiple streams on the fly, and they are more power efficient than the 13900K (and are also easier on the wallet).
My drives now spin slower when not in use
Why leave a hard drive running when not in use?
A spinning hard drive can consume between 6 and 10 W of power. When you have 12 drives in a system, that pretty quickly adds up to 72-120W of power just from the drive alone. This is why my Unraid server is configured to slow down disks that are not actively used, and most other operating systems offer similar functionality.
Basically, if a drive goes 30 minutes without access, the operating system will slow it down. This drive now goes from 6-10W of power to around 0.5W typically. Although it’s rare, I’ve had my entire array shut down in the past, dropping the system from 72-120W to just 6W.
There’s really no benefit to leaving disks running 24/7 in a homelab environment. Your drives will generally last longer and cost you less to run if you leave them spinning. So if your drives aren’t slowing down, you definitely need to start.
The equipment you buy for your homelab is just the beginning of the amount you will spend on it. Like I said, I was paying almost $100 a month just on electricity at one point, and my electricity only costs $0.11/kWh, which is pretty affordable compared to most countries.
If you haven’t performed an audit on your homelab hardware recently, now is a great time to do so. It’s the start of the year and you can probably find some good deals on used equipment to replace aging, power-hungry systems with something a little more efficient.
