I have been vaguely aware that my hardware isn’t very efficient and my sever is often showing signs of being stressed when it shouldn’t be – lots of hot air coming out the back etc. I have finally got round to using a energy monitor plug on it, and I can see on my current hardware this is not cost effective.

As a starting point, Google is wanting to change me £80 a year for 2TB across drive/photos/gmail. I know the NAS can do more than that, I could replace some streaming services with Plex perhaps. This is about more than money, for sure: privacy, control, simplifying, having fun.. but cost effectiveness needs to be considered too. So, let’s work through it.

A big hungry problem

This is my HexOS NAS right now:

She’s using up about 2kWh per 2kWhday of electricity. This is significantly more than my bothers HexOS server

How much is this costing me?

I live in the UK and we have expensive electricity (narrowly avoided going down a rabbit hole on this, don’t know how expensive compared to everyone else’s, but just… expensive).

I’m probably paying for my electricity more than you, if you’re reading from some other place than here.

I pay 22.22p per KWH. I don’t have any off peak variation with my current supplier either, this is seemingly rare in the UK. I pay that price any time, day or night (yes so its expensive – and f***ng stupid too). I’m not on the cheapest deal because I buy 100% renewable.

I calculated how much the sever on the existing hardware is costing me to run.

I originally made an error while doing this, I had misread my electricity costs from 22.22p per day to £2.22 per day! In true dyslexic style even my misreading was wrong, I should have misread it as £22.22 per day lol. I originally thought the server was costing me £4.38 per day ($6) – which seemed plausible to me, though freaked me out big time.

So I recalculated and for the redo of the sums I did a slightly different sum: before I had used minutes as a decimal which is wrong (there are 60 mins and not 100 in a hour!) so this time I rounded up from 25.54 hours to 26 (the outrage!!).

So it seems from my limited mathematical ability that the NAS is costing me about:

• 43.03p per day ($0.60)
• That’s £156.95 per year ($215)

And I’m not even doing anything on the server, the machine is basically just idling! This is too expensive.

Turning down the power (with existing hardware)

☎️ Phone a friend: I called my brother and he said try looking in the bios for some energy saving options. He thinks his HexOS server is costing about 1p an hour based off the household smart meter. He asked me to check my CPU usage: that’s usually low but does spike up. However my RAM is consistently busy as a bee. Not sure why yet! He sent me an Aliexpress link which I am yet to look at, too overwhelmed!

So I turned to power mode in the bios, this is the impact it had:

On the eco setting the use is 1.96 kWh per day:

• £43.37 – so slightly more / no difference / my maths isn’t good enough to tell

I know pretty clearly here that I need to get diffrent hardware, but just for fun lets check the carbon footprint.

Carbon footprint of this HexOS server

In the eco mode this machine is using about 715kWh of electricity per year. According to some random internet sites (refs at bottom) this is 148.055 kg CO₂e

• Driving 483.2 miles in a car
• Eating 67.6 steaks (as a Vegan, this server basically obliterates my dietary impact!)
• 0.8 of a round trip flight from Helsinki to Munich (about 4 hours of flying I guess?)

Suffice it to say this is really not good.

Turning off for now

Until I have resolved this, I’m turning my server off. Actually I didn’t end up doing that because I figured out the lower cost and within a day I was replacing the motherbard. Interestingly, the idea of turning it off made me realise I was going to miss Immich already – I’m loving getting photos from my phone onto my laptop within seconds!!! This beats Google images hands down, even if the server is expensive.

References

https://rensmart.com/Calculators/KWH-to-CO2

https://www.openco2.net/en/co2-converter

PS I moved to a new energy supplier recently and so I don’t have easy access to compare my bills to past months, however, I was pretty sure my bills were higher than they should have been which is why I switched off my server over the school holidays. This does seem very high