I got a power-efficient mainboard and PSU. I think that’ll be the lion’s share. And I don’t have any unnecessary stuff like a GPU or extra stuff connected.
I ran powertop and adopted the recommendations to set the various buses, peripherals and devices into powersave mode. That does a few Watts here and there. CPU of course is also allowed to save power when idle.
And then I made the harddisks spin down after 40min of not being used. Or something like that. So they’ll automatically spin down at night and when I’m not using them. As spinning hdds consume quite a lot of power if you have multiple of them and compare it to the 15-20W or so the rest of the computer uses. The operating system is on a SSD.





Yeah, I think the correct sticker on a PSU would be something like 80 Plus Ruby?! Everything else comes with 80+% efficiency at 20% rated load. Which is 200W for a 1000W PSU. And there’s no guarantee on what happens below that, so it might very well be utter garbage at a home server power draw of 20-30W.
You never know without looking up the datasheets. Though, back when I built my home server/NAS, I failed to find a good one. I got a PicoPSU and a 12V power brick instead. Not sure if that’s still a thing. But I remember it was a lot of work to find proper and efficient components. And it doesn’t make any sense to put in all the effort (and money) and then burn all the saved energy, and then some more, in an average PSU.
Some MiniPCs, NUCs and even computers also come with fairly efficient power supplies.