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What did you learn this month that actually saved you money

Off Topic by kate3 19 replies 1.2K views
kate3

Member OP

#1

Bought a cheap power monitor off the usual site and plugged it into my homelab rack. Discovered my "idle" virtualization tax was pulling 180W because I left every VM running 24/7 for no reason. Scripted shutdown of non-critical containers based on actual usage patterns.

Savings: roughly £18/month. Pays for the monitor in two months.

The real lesson: we obsess over cgroup limits and kernel schedulers but ignore the physical layer. Watts are watts.

virsh list --all | wc -l: 47
minh1987

Member

#2

In my country electricity is very expensive. How much you pay per kwh

phở at 3AM, deploy at 4
lee_mcr

Member

#3

Right then, kate's got me thinking. Ran the same check on our Hostinger shared nodes. Turns out we had a few ancient Xeon boxes that were basically space heaters. Migrated the last stragglers off, retired the hardware, saved enough to not raise prices this quarter.

Proper result. Cheers lads

Honey badger don't care... about downtime
kate3

Member OP

#4
minh1987 said:
How much you pay per kwh

About €0.35 at the moment. Netherlands has been brutal since the 2022 mess, still not fully back down. My £18 was rough conversion; it's closer to €22 for me.

The monitor itself was a Brennenstuhl PM231E, nothing special. The win was the data making me actually act on it.

virsh list --all | wc -l: 47
minh1987

Member

#5

In VN I pay around 2,000 VND per kWh for the commercial rate, which is roughly $0.08. Even so my small Dell tower + a few Pis was adding up. I moved the heavy stuff to a Vultr VPS in Singapore and shut down the tower nights. Saved maybe 400k VND/month. Not huge but covers my mobile data.

phở at 3AM, deploy at 4
Berlin1

Member

#6
lee_mcr said:
Migrated the last stragglers off, retired the hardware

This is the part people miss. "Cloud" just means you stopped seeing the power bill, not that it vanished. Those Xeons became Hetzner's problem — https://www.hetzner.com/cloud — or whoever you moved to, but the watts are still somewhere.

I keep my stuff on a single NUC in the kitchen. 15W idle. My entire infrastructure draws less than kate3's "idle tax."

lee_mcr

Member

2 #7
Berlin1 said:
Those Xeons became Hetzner's problem

Fair point, but I was on shared nodes already. The alternative was buying new metal, which has embodied carbon and capex. Retiring old kit and consolidating onto newer AMD boxes at Hostinger's end was the least-worst option. I'm not going full bare metal for £3/month hosting.

Still check your own draw though. Agreed there.

Honey badger don't care... about downtime
MA

Member

9 #8

I did the same audit in Tallinn. Found my Unraid box with 4 spinners was pulling 90W at idle. Replaced two older WD Reds with a single larger Exos, spun down the parity overnight. Down to 55W now.

Estonian electricity is ~€0.20/kWh so that's €5/month. Small but the drives will pay for themselves in... three years. Hm.

rudi3

Member

sudo rm -rf /

#9
mark_byte said:
Three years

This is why I don't math before buying. I just tell myself I'm "optimizing" and enjoy the quieter box.

Real saving this month: learned my landlord pays for water heating centrally and doesn't meter per flat. Longer showers. Zero regrets.

tokyodhifi7

Member

#10

Related: IPv4 addresses cost me more than power. My Tokyo ISP charges ¥550/month for a static v4. Switched to v6-only plus Mackerel's free tier for monitoring over v6. Saved ¥6,600/year.

V4 is legacy. Legacy is expensive.

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