Electrical costs to run a home web server

[Eric Oyen]

Back when I ran a home server on my Athlon X2 with 1500 W supply, the machine never drew that much. Even with several disks spinning, 8 VMWare instances going and a few other goodies, that machine never drew more than 600w at maximum. I kept it live 24/7 for a few years and it added less than $120 yearly to the electrical bill. These days, that machine is out of service and is only good for parts. My Mac mini, which draws at most 100 W under full load is on 24/7 and I don’t even see it add that much to the electrical bill here. There are really only 3 high draw appliances in this house now:
1. The refrigerator
2. The stove/oven 
3. The master cool evaporative cooler. Everything else either runs on wall warts or only gets used occasionally. In fact, we spend less than $150 a month here for electric. Now, if I put that Athlon X2 back into service, we might see $10 a month in extra use. I am still contemplating putting it back up and using it as my go to linux development machine.

-Eric
From the Central Offices of the Technomage Guild, Utilities Dept.

> On Jul 21, 2021, at 7:33 AM, Keith Smith via PLUG-discuss <plug-discuss at lists.phxlinux.org> wrote:
> 
> 
> 
> Hi,
> 
> I just read this quote about the electrical costs to run a web server from home:
> 
> Cost: While it may sound cheaper to use that computer lying around doing nothing when creating your web server, when you factor in the cost of powering an old computer 24 hours a day, it can get very expensive. A 250W desktop computer running 24 hours per day at 12 cents per KW/h is a whopping $262.00 per year!
> 
> ---
> I think their math is wrong.
> 
> The average residential electricity rate in Chandler is 10.85¢/kWh.
> 
> I'm thinking a low traffic PHP web server running on an old Dell with a 400 watt power supply is not using but maybe 100 watts on average.  I've read that the computer should use no more than half the power supply capacity.  Is this correct?
> 
> If my home web server is using 100 watts an hour that mean 100 watts * 30 days * 24 hours or 72K watts.
> 
> I'm thinking 72 * .1085 = $7.81 a month.
> 
> Any thoughts are much appreciated.
> 
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