this post was submitted on 05 Jan 2026
34 points (100.0% liked)

Selfhosted

54450 readers
862 users here now

A place to share alternatives to popular online services that can be self-hosted without giving up privacy or locking you into a service you don't control.

Rules:

  1. Be civil: we're here to support and learn from one another. Insults won't be tolerated. Flame wars are frowned upon.

  2. No spam posting.

  3. Posts have to be centered around self-hosting. There are other communities for discussing hardware or home computing. If it's not obvious why your post topic revolves around selfhosting, please include details to make it clear.

  4. Don't duplicate the full text of your blog or github here. Just post the link for folks to click.

  5. Submission headline should match the article title (don’t cherry-pick information from the title to fit your agenda).

  6. No trolling.

  7. No low-effort posts. This is subjective and will largely be determined by the community member reports.

Resources:

Any issues on the community? Report it using the report flag.

Questions? DM the mods!

founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
ruud@lemmy.world
Loki@lemmy.world
CannaVet@lemmy.world
devve@lemmy.world
HybridSarcasm@lemmy.world
HybridSarcasm@lemmy.hybridsarcasm.xyz
34
ISO Homelab Power Saving Methods [SOLVED FOR NOW] (lemmy.world)
submitted 6 days ago* (last edited 6 days ago) by irmadlad@lemmy.world to c/selfhosted@lemmy.world
17 comments fedilink hide all child comments
 

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.

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[–] ptz@dubvee.org 7 points 6 days ago

I downgraded from used enterprise gear to those ultra small form factor PCs. They sip power well enough on their own that I haven't really bothered tuning anything. I suppose I could cap the frequency with cpufrequtils and set the governor to conservative rather than on-demand (I do this with my battery-powered RasPi projects) but I'm not sure how much difference that'll make for my servers.

In the past, I had Docker Swarm setup and automation to collapse the swarm down to a single machine (powering the other ones down and back on with WoL) but that was more trouble than it was worth. On average load, the USFF PCs run at about 15 watts and don't usually peak above 30 unless they're rebooting or doing something very heavy. Even transcoding doesn't break 20 watts since I'm using hardware acceleration.

The biggest power savings I found that was worth the effort was to just get rid of the enterprise gear, switch from VMs to Docker containers where possible, and get rid of stuff I'm not using (or only run it on-demand).

The only remaining enterprise power suck I have left is my managed switch. It's a 2005-era dinosaur that's loud and power hungry, but it's been a workhorse I'm having a hard time parting with.