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 
> <[email protected]> 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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