The Cost of Running a Home Lab
One of the things that is often brought on /r/selfhosted and /r/homelab when people ask for advice about buying a server is the cost of powering that device over a year and over it’s lifetime. You can get a Dell Poweredge R710 with 16 cores and 64GB of ram for less than $100 on ebay, but the cost of powering that dinosaur 24/7, 365 days a year will quickly outgrow your initial investment.
I was reading through one of these discussions recently and it made me wonder how much my homelab was costing me. I’ve slowly accumulated all my equipment over the last 5 years or so, one piece/upgrade at a time, but have never stopped to calculate the totals or how much it cost to keep that equipment running 24/7. I went through my old receipts and bought one of these Watt Power Meters on Amazon to calculate the power usage of each of my home lab devices. Here are the totals:
Equipment + Power Cost
| Device | Device Purchase Cost | Average Power Usage | Annual Cost of Running 24/7/365 @$0.12582/kWh |
|---|---|---|---|
| Netgate 4100 Firewall | $400 | 13 Watts | $14.33 |
| Dell Wyse 5070 | $80 | 5.0 Watts | $5.51 |
| Beelink SER5 | $309 | 10 Watts | 11.02 |
| i7-5820K Desktop 5x12tb HDD Drives 2x1TB NVME 2x1TB SATA | $1,700 | 122 watts | $134.47 |
| Unifi 8 Port Gigabit Switch | $109 | 4.5 Watts | $4.96 |
| Unifi WiFi Access Point | $159 | 8 Watts | $8.82 |
| TOTAL | $2,757 | 162 Watts | $179.11 |
Overall i’m surprised that the total power cost is not higher. The biggest cost by far would be the amount of time and energy I put into home lab doing research, system upgrades, creating automation scripts and playing around with new projects. Luckily those skills are carried over to my professional work environments.
Last updated on September 01, 2024. For any questions/feedback, email me at blog@zinchuk.xyz.