Let's find out just how much power a media server consumes!

[brwainer]

22 minutes ago, revsilverspine said:

Yeah, I'd sooner invest in a voltage stabilizer to be honest. Most flats around here were built in the 70s and 80s and few home owners upgrade their electrical systems

If you buy a UPS that has AVR (automatic voltage regulation, smooths out small power fluctations without having to activate the inverter and swap to battery) then it will also have a builtin wattage meter that you can read via USB and whatever software it comes with. Neither the wattage meter in a SOHO UPS nor the one in cheap models like the Kill-a-Watt are considered terribly accurate, but they're usually within 10%.

[You_are_a_cunt]

1 minute ago, brwainer said:

If you buy a UPS that has AVR (automatic voltage regulation, smooths out small power fluctations without having to activate the inverter and swap to battery) then it will also have a builtin wattage meter that you can read via USB and whatever software it comes with. Neither the wattage meter in a SOHO UPS nor the one in cheap models like the Kill-a-Watt are considered terribly accurate, but they're usually within 10%.

I'm actually looking at some Eaton and APC refurb units but they're either too big (size-wise) or don't have any sort of com pot. I don't really need a UPS for the backup power in case of power failure, I just need the OCP and OVP

[Nikolithebear]

On 6/24/2017 at 10:05 AM, brwainer said:

Spunds like a good plan. In my own home, I have 2x haswell-generation xeon servers, one with 4x 3.5" and 2x2.5" drives, and the other with 4x3.5" and 10x 2.5" drives. Those two "idle" at 15-20% CPU load. The servers plus a switch, three routers, and an ONT are plugged into a PDU which displays amperage, and that is plugged into a UPS which can tell amps and watts. At idle, the whole rack uses 1.2-1.4A, or 145-170W. The servers account for 35W (2x2.5" drives) and 50W (10x2.5" drives). 

 

I just picked up a new (to me) server though that has 2x Opteron 6220 CPUs and 10x4GB FBDIMM memory, during boot it uses 350W and it idles around 250W. The air coming out the rear fan is rather noticably warm.

 

Alongside your power data, please also report the usage of the server. For example, if one day you watch a lot of media, how much did you watch, and was it being transcoded on the server? That will make the power data more interesting. I hope you are going to log the data at least daily, and not just for the full week.

Im curious, why three routers? CCNA prep or leftovers?  Plus which routers  

[brwainer]

58 minutes ago, Nikolithebear said:

Im curious, why three routers? CCNA prep or leftovers?  Plus which routers  

I have four separate networks in my house, but sharing the same switch and APs via VLANs. The switch is actually a router/switch in a single unit, so there's really 4 routers. Each router has its own static public IP, and serves LAN via its own VLAN tag. There is also a backend VLAN that all the routers share and there are a few VMs on this network also. Clients on one network can only access services that are within the backend VLAN, or if I have specifically programmed in a static IP route and opened the ports in the firewall for that service on another VLAN. I did this because I work from home, and I want to make sure that my computers are isolated from the others in case of a network-traversing malware. My brother's devices are separated for the same reason (he is a budding tech person and I don't trust him to stay uninfected).

The four networks are:

• Mine
• My brother's
• Family's
• Guests and Verizon FIOS Set-top Boxes

The hardware is:

• Switch (also my router): Mikrotik CRS125-24G-1S-RM (basically it's the guts of a SOHO router, with a 26 port gigabit switch chip attached to it instead of some other port configuration)
• Brother's and Family's routers: Mikrotik hEX (RB750g2)
• Guest/Set-top boxes: Verizon G1100

The basic network config is:

• Verizon FIOS WAN (ONT) is connected to a port on the CRS125, and gets tagged into its own VLAN, which only the routers can connect to
• The three Mikrotik routers handle everything through a single port, in a router-on-a-stick setup. The router inside the CRS125 does this on the "CPU" internal ethernet port that connects the CPU to the switch chip.
• The G1100 router has one port for WAN and one port for LAN on the switch, both with tagging done by the switch, so the router doesn't know it is a part of any type of unusual configuration.
• The APs in my house have multiple SSIDs, each SSID does tagging for the appropriate LAN network.

I could have run all three of the main networks via a single Mikrotik router or router/switch, but then you have to be a lot more careful about firewalling the networks apart from each other. Considering each of them is powered by a 12V 1A power supply (I think the switch might be 12V 2A) I'm not too worried about the accumulated power draw.

[leadeater]

9 hours ago, brwainer said:

-snip-

I went with the FortiGate VDOM route to do the same thing but share the same hardware, more expensive but I also wanted FortiGate anyway and less cables.

[brwainer]

2 hours ago, leadeater said:

I went with the FortiGate VDOM route to do the same thing but share the same hardware, more expensive but I also wanted FortiGate anyway and less cables.

Mikrotik can do that either with Metarouter (any architecture) or Zen and KVM (x86) - my issue is that most of the stuff they offer at my price point doesn't have enough RAM for more than a single guest router, and I do want a custom designed hardware solution instead of an x86 platform due to the comparative power usage.

[leadeater]

5 minutes ago, brwainer said:

Mikrotik can do that either with Metarouter (any architecture) or Zen and KVM (x86) - my issue is that most of the stuff they offer at my price point doesn't have enough RAM for more than a single guest router, and I do want a custom designed hardware solution instead of an x86 platform due to the comparative power usage.

Yea the FortiGate ASICs crush all x86 platforms performance and power wise, not even close . Never used Mikrotik before, wonder how good that is compared to VDOMs.

[Mikensan]

Now I feel encouraged to see what my box consumes over time... E3-1220v2 / 5 disks / 1 ssd - used for ESXi datastore / plex transcoding, 0 configuration for power savings though. I'll dig out my kill-a-watt.

[AshleyAshes]

I'll post new numbers after work tonight.  But since this server sits quietly in a corner in my bedroom, low power consumption comes with additional benefits.  Less power, less heat.  Less heat, less noise.  Less heat, less additional load on the air conditioner.  Less air conditioner, less power.  Less air conditioner, less noise.

 

It all kinda factors into each other.  You know, assuming one's server is just a box inhabiting their living space.

[AshleyAshes]

79hrs in and the server has consumed 4.86 kwh,  This puts it at an average of 1.47kwh per 24hrs.

[Mikensan]

6/27
9:20pm: Begin monitoring power consumption
9:23pm: Reverting to FreeNAS 9.10.2 u2 in order to update to 9.11

6/28
7:00am Full replication began (long story), took about 4 hours
9:53pm 2.87kw @ 24.41hrs

[LucasRem]

AC/DC,  voltage stabilizer, lol, east European countries fixed it, but in house you still need the new 18Amp 360 circuit on good grounding, giving dubbel 230 to the wall outlets needed for PC's to make PSU's stable.

[AshleyAshes]

11 hours ago, Mikensan said:

6/27
9:20pm: Begin monitoring power consumption
9:23pm: Reverting to FreeNAS 9.10.2 u2 in order to update to 9.11

6/28
7:00am Full replication began (long story), took about 4 hours
9:53pm 2.87kw @ 24.41hrs

That's not bad for what it is, including how most NAS systems spin their disks 24/7.  With FlexRAID the drives still obey windows spindown rules so only the drives being accessed are spun up.  Granted this means at some times when Kodi moves to another file in a playlist that is located in a spun down drive, it can wait up to 20-25 seconds for the necessary drive to spin up and engage.

[AshleyAshes]

Almost a week later and now we're at 10.21kwh over 167hrs.  This keeps the machine inline with it's overall measurements.  It's an average of 1.467 khw per 24hrs.  These are pretty nice numbers.

 

Right now the machine is now encoding video with Handbrake, it doesn't do this much but my workstation's SSD is being RMAed so the server is now ripping DVDs to HEVC.  When the CPU is fully engaged for handbrake it seems it's wattage is 115w-120w.

[Pixel5]

18 hours ago, AshleyAshes said:

Almost a week later and now we're at 10.21kwh over 167hrs.  This keeps the machine inline with it's overall measurements.  It's an average of 1.467 khw per 24hrs.  These are pretty nice numbers.

certainly less than i would have expected but still over the year that would increase my total energy usage by almost 17% with one single device.

[AshleyAshes]

2 hours ago, Pixel5 said:

certainly less than i would have expected but still over the year that would increase my total energy usage by almost 17% with one single device.

Well, I also have to consider the devices and services that this eliminates: Namely cable.  I've cut the cord entirely except for the internet and cable boxes normally operate 24/7, decoding video and everything even while the display is powered off.  Digital cable boxes take a surprisingly long time to boot and normal consumer operation is to have them run, with them often sipping down 30-60w at all times.  It also eliminates the need to pay for any kind of cable TV service so that's a fee eliminated.  And it eliminates the need for other streaming services such as Funimation, CrunchyRoll or Netflix.

 

Since it runs torrents 24/7 which means it can tick away or seed very slow moving torrents there's an advantage to me there.

[Mikensan]

@Pixel5 Doing some rough math, if 1.47kw/day = to a 17% increase for your yearly bill, that means you consume 3159kw per year. (1.47*365 = 535kw, then 535/.17=3159) How in the world do you keep your consumption under 300kw per month? No HVAC and a gas stove/dryer/hot-water?

 

I consume 1300kw/month on average living in the mid atlantic.

 

Anywho, I think it isn't about add a device or not, more about making the decision to add one and doing so as efficiently as possible. I forgot to check last night but the other 2 nights I'm averaging 2.6kw/day while it's pretty much idle. I think energy consumption is good info for a lot of people. Pretty cool to me you can save so much energy! Current update:

 

day 1: 2.87 @ 24.41hrs  2.87KW

day 2: 5.57 @ 52hrs       2.7KW

day 3: 7.72 @ 73hrs        2.15KW

[AshleyAshes]

Just now, Mikensan said:

@Pixel5 Doing some rough math, if 1.47kw/day = to a 17% increase for your yearly bill, that means you consume 3159kw per year. (1.47*365 = 535kw, then 535/.17=3159) How in the world do you keep your consumption under 300kw per month? No HVAC and a gas stove/dryer/hot-water?

It's hot that implausible if one lives in an apartment with out the need for air conditioning.  My 95yo apartment building relies on a central hot water boiler to drive radiators and so units can't be individually billed for that.  I pay power but not heat basically.

That said, it's pretty low.  I do pay for air conditioning but even factoring that out my lowest is like 241kwh for one month, this was in the winter when I was working a lot and not home as much.  When I'm not home the only things running are the fridge, the deep freezer, modem, router, network switches and server plus a few other things doing their 0.5-1.5w of 'vampire power'.  That said, on weekends when I'm home as opposed to work days, even in the winter, I can effectively double my power consumption on account of the 4930k desktop workstation, the laptop, the i7 3770K powered HTPC and the 65" 4k TV hooked up to it.

 

Though also when talking about electrical prices you do also have to talk about other costs you may minimize.  I have a 3.5 cubic foot freezer draws power but allows me to stock up on lazy frozen goodies when they're on sale. My HTPCs, while built from 'full fat' desktop components and drawing far more power than even a top tior Android box, they are built and maintained from hand-me-down parts from the desktop workstation, so the hardware is largely 'free' even while seeing a stream of upgrade components over time as the workstation gets upgraded.  The server saves me from paying for cable or streaming services.

 

But this is all personal.  Someone elses lifestyle could use just a lot less hardware.  Someone with just a TV and game console, and a single PC could draw a lot less power than me.

[Mikensan]

10 minutes ago, AshleyAshes said:

snip

That's pretty impressive, guess I'm just a power hog lol. The apartment I lived in before was an older building and had thicker concrete floors than most. 1bdr, 700sqft. Heating used gas, and it hardly ever had to run. During the coldest months I think my gas bill was.. $30? Where I'm at now, it's $80 for gas heating. So it certainly makes sense that living space and location affects power consumption, but it's still wild to see less than 300kw/m average for the whole year. Either it was exactly 260kw per month or it varied, meaning some months were even less. I suppose it is possible however, just impressive.

 

My electricity is pretty darn cheap, so it sort of causes me to have bad behaviors. Lights on 24/7, desktop on 24/7 and such. May was... 1355kw and the bill was about $90. It is however a 1hr drive to work each way, so there's that offset.

 

Glad you started this post, always curious about energy usage.

[AshleyAshes]

2 minutes ago, Mikensan said:

My electricity is pretty darn cheap, so it sort of causes me to have bad behaviors. Lights on 24/7, desktop on 24/7 and such. May was... 1355kw and the bill was about $90. It is however a 1hr drive to work each way, so there's that offset.

I hope that you're referring to an entire house with this  Cause my 550sqft apartment peaked at 850kwh for a July 21-Aug 21 billing period last summer, and that was with two air conditioners running when I was at home.   So I can't imagine 1350kwh unless it was for an actual house instead of an apartment.

[Mikensan]

Just now, AshleyAshes said:

I hope that you're referring to an entire house with this  Cause my 550sqft apartment peaked at 850kwh for a July 21-Aug 21 billing period last summer, and that was with two air conditioners running when I was at home.   So I can't imagine 1350kwh unless it was for an actual house instead of an apartment.

yup, house now. 2200sqft, 600 of which is a basement but it gets heated/cooled too. The 1bdr was $1345/m, the house is $1450 (Principal, interest, taxes, insurance together). My state has some nice first time home owner options. Still deciding if moving from the city > suburban was worth it lol, the commute is rough ~_~.

 

I think I consumed... 900-1100kw in my apartment, I know my bill ranged from $100-$160 and it was around .13-.14 per kw (including fees and taxes). But I had a cheapy plasma TV (100w+) which was on every hour I was home, my server was a 60w Core 2 duo but my desktop was an i7 920 with a radeon 6850 that idled at damn near 200w / 400w full tilt and one more desktop that was on while home (room-mate) not sure of the specs. 

[Pixel5]

5 hours ago, Mikensan said:

@Pixel5 Doing some rough math, if 1.47kw/day = to a 17% increase for your yearly bill, that means you consume 3159kw per year. (1.47*365 = 535kw, then 535/.17=3159) How in the world do you keep your consumption under 300kw per month? No HVAC and a gas stove/dryer/hot-water?

yea thats about right, i use about 3000-3500kWh a year with a 2 person household.

Hot water comes from electric heaters which is the main part of our electricity bill, the heating for winter is a central gas heating system that heats all units in the house.

 

no AC or HVAC system installed so no power for that one either.

 

but even with that low consumption we pay like 80 bucks a month for electricity thanks to the high energy prices in germany.

[Mikensan]

On 7/3/2017 at 3:32 PM, Pixel5 said:

yea thats about right, i use about 3000-3500kWh a year with a 2 person household.

Hot water comes from electric heaters which is the main part of our electricity bill, the heating for winter is a central gas heating system that heats all units in the house.

 

no AC or HVAC system installed so no power for that one either.

 

but even with that low consumption we pay like 80 bucks a month for electricity thanks to the high energy prices in germany.

Sorry about those electricity costs, but that low energy use is really impressive. Hopefully prices get lower as Germany switches away from nuclear (thinking staff required for a nuclear plant vs renewable source upkeep). Really need to rethink how I use energy lol.

[AshleyAshes]

5 minutes ago, Mikensan said:

Sorry about those electricity costs, but that low energy use is really impressive. Hopefully prices get lower as Germany switches away from nuclear (thinking staff required for a nuclear plant vs renewable source upkeep). Really need to rethink how I use energy lol.

For me, I can afford high energy bills if it comes to that, it's that I kinda hate the idea of wasting something I don't need to waste and wasting money that I don't need to waste.  So while I pay good attention to my power consumption it's almost morel like a 'game' where I think 'Oh, I can do better than that.'  Also LED light bulbs are great because I am the WORST at remembering to buy light bulbs when I'm shopping.  I once had an apartment where I got down to ONE working bulb before I realized I had to make a specific trip to the store for light bulbs before I was in total darkness.  Meanwhile my LED bulbs are nearly 3 years old now.

 

But it's same way where if I have older PC parts that are still 'usable but not usable to me' I'll sell them on eBay, Kijiji, or even just give them away.  If someone else can use it and it'll just collect dust in my home, I'd rather see it get used somewhere else.

 

...Seriously guys, I got a freakin' spreadsheet. D:

 

[Mikensan]

9 minutes ago, AshleyAshes said:

For me, I can afford high energy bills if it comes to that, it's that I kinda hate the idea of wasting something I don't need to waste and wasting money that I don't need to waste.  So while I pay good attention to my power consumption it's almost morel like a 'game' where I think 'Oh, I can do better than that.'  Also LED light bulbs are great because I am the WORST at remembering to buy light bulbs when I'm shopping.  I once had an apartment where I got down to ONE working bulb before I realized I had to make a specific trip to the store for light bulbs before I was in total darkness.  Meanwhile my LED bulbs are nearly 3 years old now.

 

But it's same way where if I have older PC parts that are still 'usable but not usable to me' I'll sell them on eBay, Kijiji, or even just give them away.  If someone else can use it and it'll just collect dust in my home, I'd rather see it get used somewhere else.

 

...Seriously guys, I got a freakin' spreadsheet. D:

 

That's pretty cool, and I have the same mindset for a lot of other things but never considered putting the same mentality towards energy consumption. Certainly motivating to try and get it lower. Hey I did buy a SOC box for my firewall so I wouldn't be running it on a 200w C1100 lol.