Homelabs are fun and I absolutely love mine. However, it was using way more electricity than it needed, and that was costing me more money every month than I was willing to pay. Here are three ways I lowered my homelab’s impact on my monthly power bill.
I replaced energy-sucking systems with power-sipping alternatives
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That old server seemed like a good idea at first.
Once upon a time, I ran all of my homelab services on one system: my Lenovo RD440 rack-mount server. This functions as my NAS that runs Unraidand it used to be all I had in my homelab. Fast-forward to February 2025, and I picked up two new servers. Man, I was excited, and I immediately put them both in use. One server gave me 27TB of storage, the other had 20 cores, 40 threads, and 192GB of RAM plus plenty of NVMe and spinning rust storage for VMs.
What I didn’t realize, however, was those two new servers cost more to run per month than they saved me—by a lot. Once I sat down and realized that my homelab was costing nearly $100 per month in electricity by itself, I knew something had to change. That’s when I realized I had an “old” desktop in the closet that I hadn’t used in a while.
I had an Intel desktop from a previous job sitting unused, and decided to check it out. It was an i9-13900K with 32GB of DDR4 RAM. These days, that’s a goldmine, and when I found it, I thought the same. Sure, it wasn’t a 20-core 40-thread system with 192GB of RAM, but I didn’t really need those specs for the VMs I was running. I simply picked up 64GB of RAM (for $120…the good ol’ days) and migrated my virtual machines over to the new system.
With 96GB of RAM and plenty of native NVMe storage, the new server was actually faster than the old Xeon setup I was running. The best part, however, is that it run at less than 50W most of the time, when the rack-mount server was pulling well over 250W a majority of the time.
This alone cut my power bill by a drastic amount. I also shut down the 27TB storage server as I simply wasn’t using it, and that saved even more on electricity.
Here’s the thing: if I were to go back in time, and had I not had the i9-13900K system in the closet, I would have simply sold the Dell servers and purchased a mini PC. Mini PCs sip power by comparison and still pack plenty of power to handle the majority of homelab tasks.
The moral of this story is to only use the hardware you need, and not what you “want.” I wanted the big rack-mount server as my VM system, but it just simply cost more than it was worth to run, and I wasn’t fully utilizing it.
- Brand
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Beelink
- CPU
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Ryzen 3 3200U
The Beelink SER3 mini PC is the perfect entry-level Windows desktop for those on a budget. With a Ryzen 3 3200U processor, this desktop ships with Windows 11 Pro and 16GB of DDR4 RAM. A 500GB SSD is pre-installed (and user-upgradable), and you’ll find dual HDMI ports, Ethernet, and four USB-A ports on this compact desktop.
Switching systems allowed me to get rid of my dedicated GPU in favor of an iGPU
Modern iGPUs are actually pretty great.
Both when I had just one server and when I was using multiple rack-mount servers, I had a dedicated graphics card installed for hardware transcoding in Plex. A side benefit I didn’t expect whenever I switched over to the Intel system was that I could retire the dedicated graphics card. It wasn’t anything crazy, but the card often drew 75W by itself.
Switching to the iGPU in my i9-13900K gave me access to newer, more modern codecs, and also cut my energy usage by a lot. Now, my entire virtual machine server draws less power than just my dedicated graphics card did before.
You might be saying, “But I don’t have access to an i9-13900K!” and that’s perfectly okay. Unless you’re doing insanely intense transcoding all the time, going with a lower-powered systemlike the Intel N100 or N150, will do you just fine for an iGPU. Those processors are more than capable of transcoding multiple streams on the fly with ease, and they sip power compared to the 13900K (and are easier on the wallet, too).
My drives now spin down when not in use
Why keep an HDD spinning when it’s not in use?
A spinning hard drive can take anywhere from 6 to 10W of power. When you have 12 drives in a system, that adds up pretty quickly to 72 to 120W of electricity just from the drive alone. This is why I have my Unraid server set to spin down drives that aren’t actively being used, and most other operating systems offer a similar functionality.
Basically, if a drive goes 30 minutes without being accessed, the OS will spin it down. This drive now goes from using 6 to 10W of electricity to typically about 0.5W. While rare, I have seen my entire array spun down before, which drops the 72 to 120W system down to just 6W.
There’s really no benefit to leaving drives spun up 24/7 in a homelab environment. Your drives will typically last longer and cost you less to run if you let them spin down. So, if you’re not having your drives spin down, you should definitely start.
The hardware you buy for your homelab is only the start of how much money you’ll spend on it. As I said, I was paying nearly $100 per month in electricity alone at one point, and my electricity is only $0.11/kWh, which is quite affordable compared to most of the country.
If you haven’t done an audit on your homelab hardware recently, now’s the perfect time to do so. It’s the start of the year, and you can likely find some good deals on second-hand hardware to replace aging and power-sucking systems with something that’s a bit more efficient.
