Energy Crisis - Lowering Running Costs

[mrrodge]

Hi all,

First post. Sorry if I'm in the wrong place!

I have an ageing desktop being used as a home server. It has an i5-4590K with 16GB memory and 2x 4TB drives mirrored using Storage Spaces for data. It also has a 4-port network adapter on the PCI-E slot. Boot drive is a mediocre SSD, which is where the VMs live. The server is used for:

• OPNSense firewall managing internet connection, routing (DHCP, DNS etc) and VPN server
• Paperless-NGX
• Pi-Hole
• Home Assistant (Has a USB Zigbee dongle connected to the host)

The host itself runs:

• Plex server for family photos and TV/movies, just streamed to one TV but it's 4K HDR blu-ray rips so is pretty high bitrate. Not used for transcodes, all direct playing so doesn't hurt the CPU.
• VEEAM for backup of virtual machines and host to external 8TB USB drive.
• Ubiquiti management software.

I also have a Hikvision NVR running 5 cams, two of which are 4k, the rest 1080p. It has two 2TB hard drives.

My whole setup is great and has run for years without issue. If it wasn't for the energy crisis I wouldn't be breaking anything. The whole shebang, with a couple of switches, averages between 95-120W depending on load and temperature (it's in the loft). At £0.51 per unit it's going to be pretty expensive to run (up to £86/month and predicted to get worse next year!) and I'm very reluctant to just switch it off as I'd lose my home automation. I thought about shifting Home Assistant onto a Pi or something and turning off the server but stuff like Paperless and the firewall/VPN and Plex server would be sorely missed. I'm sure I can't be the only one in this position!

I do however have a Google Coral USB I could lay my hands on (at work, unused) and I happen to have an Optiplex 5070 with 16GB memory in my son's room, which only gets occasional use. The logical thing here would be:

• Swap my son's Optiplex with the server (i5-9600).
• Drop the NVR and use the Coral with Frigate and Home Assistant. Hopefully get improved performance as well as power saving.

The target is to reduce power consumption by half, without spending too much (a couple hundred wouldn't be the end of the world, it would pay for itself with the saving). Surely this is achievable!

The bits I'm struggling with are:

• Storage layout
• Which hypervisor to use

Hypervisor

The hypervisor is a fairly simple one - it's likely going to be Proxmox as many seem to have working configs with Frigate. The real question is containers or virtual machines? Containers hurt my brain. NVR on the host, so no Coral passthrough, or in a VM?

Storage

Same story at home or at work - storage is always the problem! Bits struggling with below:

• Everyone seems to build in redundancy and have loads of disks. But do they need it? We're looking at 6-12W of power per disk. If I continue using my backup to USB, could I drop one of the disks from my mirror? I don't actually have redundancy for my VMs now, only my photos.
• If I upgraded to a single 6TB drive and just had the one disk (plus SSD for OS/VMs), is it risky to use it for both NVR and streaming Plex, whilst also holding all the family photos? Is it too much? I calculate no more than 6MB/s constant write for NVR and 10MB/s read when streaming a movie. Nowhere near the capability of a single disk (realistically 80-90MB/s, but will this halve if the disk has to seek more?).
• Any advantage to separate partitions for NVR/storage?

If my performance goes through the floor with single disk, I'll obviously have to split to more disks using an external enclosure. This will likely mean an eSATA HBA, plus the enclosure itself. Or USB. Which route though? Will the Coral's USB throughput hinder the storage enclosure? Is it best to get the HBA to keep them separate? If I get an enclosure, how many disks? 2? 4? Single volume? Pair of mirrors for NVR and pair for Plex?! Perhaps m.2 PCIE card and an extra SSD for redundancy on VMs, regular backup on single spinning disk?

The more thoughts/opinions the merrier. Thanks!

 

[LostCorpse]

food for thought:
2tb & 4tb ssd disk instead of mechanical disks. expensive.. but long term savings.
maybe consider an older laptop as a host, most laptops will only draw a max of 65w. the right machine will have at least 2 ssd slots.. Mobile workstations up to 130w

move home automation to a pi and have it shutdown host when not needed i.e 1am to 3pm, and have host auto power on at 3pm run the vms at auto start boot?
winter heating costs also might suggest have it in living room to help heat the place.

proxmox you can pass through devices, but its a bit fiddly i think.

 

[sja360]

What about scheduled running, ie shutdown midnight to 6am and on during the day?

Pickup the most energy efficient socket 1150 'S' edition i5, should be 65w instead of 88w, hopefully it will be a straight trade for selling yours.

Tried under clocking or maximising power saving in the bios ?

I wouldn't go crazy trying spending £100's to save power, in reality...best to just switch it off or accept the cost tbh.

 

[Semple]

As above, it's unlikely you use Plex 24/7, so look at scheduling it. Home Assistant can power up my Nas/Plex on a schedule, and it then shuts down a bit after midnight.

That saves about 2/3rds of the running costs.

 

[mrrodge]

Great suggestions but to shut down I'd have to keep my NVR running (Pi isn't quick enough to run Frigate and HA). NVR is 40W+ (I think).

Don't see the need to buy a socket 1150 machine when I have the Optiplex with a 65W CPU anyway, plus I reckon it'll only use a similar amount of power a laptop will (especially if I were to use SSD or laptop HDDs). If the thing runs near idle most of the time it won't get near the TDP anyway, so I'm not too concerned over that.

My thinking was with the Coral I'd actually be able to improve my CCTV whilst being able to sack off the NVR. The iGPU on the Optiplex should help to keep the CPU near idle.

It's the storage situation I'm struggling with. For example if best practice is to keep the Frigate recordings on two separate drives, so still have four in total, I'd be saving the 40W from the NVR but the server would run 20-25W higher consumption so the benefit would be lower.

As per OP I'm toying with the idea of using one SSD for boot and VMs and one HDD for media and CCTV. I'd effectively drop 3 HDDs and an NVR, in theory saving me 40 quid a month come October.

I guess the alternative would be to go Pi for HA and shut down as suggested, use SD cards in the cameras but SD cards 24/7 soon give up the ghost and same applies to the Pi - I reckon I'd lose a lot of the reliability. Plus I like having HA virtualised so I can use snapshots/checkpoints to fix things I break!

Thanks!

 

[BigChin1]

I guess the alternative would be to go Pi for HA and shut down as suggested, use SD cards in the cameras but SD cards 24/7 soon give up the ghost and same applies to the Pi - I reckon I'd lose a lot of the reliability.

Pi supports SSD with appropriate cable, running my HA that way.

 

[Buffalo2102]

Just to say that passthrough with Proxmox has been simple & effective for me. I have several VMs with disks passed through, one that also has a TV tuner passed through, all without issue. Just a simple line in the VM config and it's taken care of.

 

[Semple]

Pi supports SSD with appropriate cable, running my HA that way.

Got mine set up this way too. With the amount of data that was being written the SD card just couldn't keep up.

So it's more than quick enough to run HA.

 

[mrrodge]

Didn't know you could do that with Pi - that's pretty good. I know it's quick enough for HA but don't think it is for Frigate with 5 cams, which would be needed on demand (I arm/disarm my motion alerts at night & when away).

I put an energy monitor on the Optiplex at the weekend and it idles at around 15W with no HDD in so I reckon it'll still be under 50W running Frigate and all the other stuff - at current prices it'll save me a fair few quid every month.

 

[joelk2]

As above, it's unlikely you use Plex 24/7, so look at scheduling it. Home Assistant can power up my Nas/Plex on a schedule, and it then shuts down a bit after midnight.

That saves about 2/3rds of the running costs.

sorry to but in a little with this but could you run me through how you do this?

 

[Semple]

sorry to but in a little with this but could you run me through how you do this?

No worries, the shutdown is pretty easy, that's just using ms scheduler with a script to issue the shutdown command. Just need to be mindful that if you set it to a time that you may still be watching something then you'd have to login to the server to pause/cancel shutdown. I think mines set to 1am, so even if I am watching something at that time it's probably a good reminder to go to sleep.

As for the startup, home assistant has a wake on lan component that presents as a switch. I then have a scheduler addon that triggers the switch at whatever time I set it to and if everything is working correctly will power up my microserver.

Might be a bit more difficult if you run plex virtualised/containerized.

 

[cokecan]

The SFF desktop PC's from Dell, HP and Lenovo (Optiplex micro, prodesk mini etc) are capable of idling at like 3-5W with a single nvme SSD. I have a G4 EliteDesk mini with 2x NVME drives and 3x Sata SSD's squeezed in and that idles at 13-15W. This is running Plex and AdGuard/HomeAssistant as virtual machines

 

[qbhatti]

What quality of life will you have scheduling when Plex is on etc..?
See if you can invest in solar...best thing we ever did..

 

[ginjaninja]

I put my SATA drives to sleep after period of inactivity. saves 50W not to be sniffed at.