Added solar and a battery. I don't worry too much about the power use as a result.
this post was submitted on 01 Apr 2026
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Letting go of older inefficient hardware is no 1.
Why run a 200w server when a 30w mini PC or 10w pi can run a dozen containers
The mini PCs draw up to 30W, mine runs at an 8W average
I have never measured my pi consumption but ilo says my DL380 Gen8 idles at between 120w to 180w
Sadly this. I have a graveyard of nice server boards that I got cheap before realizing how power hungry they are.
For CPUs basically anything older than gen 6 intel is too power hungry (although be careful with Xeon and xeon derived cpus, that are sometimes older gens rebadged as gen 6).
Do you have any idea what your hardware is actually pulling from the outlet? Maybe it's not that bad after all?
Mine is pulling around 55W from the wall in its "normal" state. Meaning two 3.5" HDDs spun up, and a bunch of light services running. Which is squarely in "not great, not terrible" territory.
Apart from flipping the power saver switch on the mainboard I haven't done anything to save power. I haven't checked if that's doing anything either. It's a 3rd gen core i5 iirc, which isn't great at idle power consumption, so maybe that switch is doing something...
I also haven't had any luck with getting the drives to spin down reliably anyways, and afaik it's better for them to just stay spinning so I haven't bothered much to change that.
Just as a reference, my NUC with 40+ containers, runs at around 3-4 W, not counting the 2,5" 5400 rpm HDD attached.
I use powetop on laptops to recommend config optimizations, it could run on a server too.
hdparm can configure HDDs to powerdown, but I've never had any success using it on my router.
In theory I think You could use WoL and have your router wake a device before sending traffic but I haven't seen any guides for doing this so maybe I'm missing something.
WoL works, but your server will take some time to come back online, but the router probably wont be able to buffer the traffic for that long, and a tcp connection would likely timeout before then anyway. You usually want to send the WoL magic packet, wait for the server to come back online, and only then start sending traffic.
Dell Thin Client type machine with a 2TB SSD of the essentials. Backs up once a week to my gaming desktop. Has enough horsepower for Homeassistant, Jellyfin, adblocking. Enough fast USB for two 2.5GBE. Upgraded to 16GB RAM before the crisis, but could make due with 8GB. Cheaper than a raspberry pi for only a few extra watts.
I had to start over anyways, so I choose SSD only. Pricier of course, but I don't need a terrible lot of space anyways.
When I still had HDDs, they were usually used once a day for backups, and I spun them down after that.
Optimizing power profiles and C states makes a little difference, but planning with efficient hardware from the beginning is the most important thing. Don't use your old gaming PC if you care for power efficiency.
Acronyms, initialisms, abbreviations, contractions, and other phrases which expand to something larger, that I've seen in this thread:
| Fewer Letters | More Letters |
|---|---|
| NUC | Next Unit of Computing brand of Intel small computers |
| PSU | Power Supply Unit |
| SATA | Serial AT Attachment interface for mass storage |
[Thread #204 for this comm, first seen 1st Apr 2026, 10:30] [FAQ] [Full list] [Contact] [Source code]
When building you own servers from consumer hardware this is a bit difficult, but getting a PSU that actually fits to the power use profile of the server seems to make a difference. Sadly it is hard to get small PSUs with sufficient SATA power connections.