I’ll just come out and say it: 50W. I know, I know an order of magnitude above what’s actually needed to host websites, media center and image gallery.
But it is a computer I had on-hand and which would be turned on a quarter of the day anyway. And these 50W also warm my home, although this is less efficient than the heat pump, of course.
What’s your usage? What do you host?
Depends where you draw the line of the home lab. I’m drawing 160W at the moment, but that includes a dedicated CCTV PC (running Proxmox in a cluster) and POE switch. The CCTV I don’t consider part of the home lab really, the alternative would be an off the shelf box and no one would consider that.
The 160W also includes a 24 port switch (I’m only using 8) and the FTTP power, plus the rake from the UPS. So probably total the actual homelab server would be about 80-100, I guess. But even then it runs my router using opnsense, so I don’t have a separate router box to power. It also serves as my “cloud” storage, so I’m not saving watts, but I’m saving the cost there.
I could get the power down quite a bit by changing the 6 HDD for 2 mirrored HDD, but the cost of large enough disks means it’d be years before it paid for itself, so I’m sticking with 6 small disks for now.
I’ve thought about trimming things down and going lower powered, but it all comes back to storage and needing the large storage online all the time.
Plus I consider a 100W a big saving when before I ran a dual Xeon Dell R710 which used around 225W under the same workload.