In an effort to make the homelab more environmentally friendly, I have started to explore ways to conserve energy consumption. I always see a lot of considerations for choosing equipment that sips power, but other than avoiding enterprise power hogs and very old equipment, I don’t see a lot of advice in how to tame the server(s) you may already have.
So far I’ve looked at:
- TLP: Adjusts CPU frequency scaling, PCI‑e ASPM, SATA link power‑management
- Powertop: Used to profile power consumption and has a tune feature
sudo powertop --auto-tune - cpufrequtils: Used to manage the CPU governor directly
- logind.conf: Can be used to put the whole server to sleep when idle
Since I am the only user of my network, and since a lot of times the server sits unused until I want to engage maybe listening to my audio collection via Navidrome, or perhaps I’m working on some automation in n8n, et al, there’s no need to be at max power 24/7.
So besides just powering off and on the server, which would work but not be quite as elegant of a solution, are there other ways you have come across, read about, deployed on your own server?
ETA: Thanks for everyone’s input. I realize that the ideal scenario is to have more energy effecient equipment. Sometimes tho, this is not a ready made solution due to many constraints. The exercise was to try to squeeze out every last little power saving option I could, without obviously replacing equipment.
Many thanks.
Honestly, every hw that is not going automatically into a power save mode when not used is utterly crap, even my home grade switches are able to do so.
So, the only thing you need to do is to buy recent hw and of course not over size your hw necessities. But recent hw tends to be more expensive, so in the end, it is an excel driven decission.
And once this is said, be careful, some hw suffer more for a on/off cycle than from a continuous power on mode. Think in hdd power cycles or condensation/ salt-rust problems in high humidity areas.