this post was submitted on 07 Jul 2025
215 points (96.5% liked)

Selfhosted

49406 readers
609 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.

Resources:

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

Questions? DM the mods!

founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
 

I thought this video was rather interesting, because at 12:27, the presenter crunches the numbers to find out how many years it would take for a new computer purchase to be more environmentally friendly (in regards to total CO2 expended) compared to using a less efficient used model.

Depending on the specific use case, it could take as little as 3 years to breakeven in terms of CO2 if both systems were at max power draw forever, and as long as 30 if the systems are mostly at idle.

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[–] crimsonpoodle@pawb.social 7 points 5 days ago* (last edited 5 days ago) (2 children)

I have an i7-2600 prebuilt for my NAS— is idle most of the time, bought it for $100 4 years ago. Have pretty cheap power at like $0.12 per KWh, but again mostly idle so probably doesn’t cost much anyway.

[–] 3dcadmin@lemmy.relayeasy.com 14 points 5 days ago (1 children)

I did lol at cheap kwh internet - sounds way better than talking energy costs

[–] ProdigalFrog@slrpnk.net 7 points 5 days ago* (last edited 5 days ago) (1 children)

Older desktops can have a somewhat hefty idle power draw due to the overall system consumption contributing more than expected, such as the southbridge. According to this old review of the i7-2600k, the system idles at 74w, which at $0.12 per KWh, would cost you roughly $77 per year. Though you might want to confirm that with a Kill-a-watt meter if you can (libraries sometimes lend them out), since I'm pretty sure that total system power chart includes a discrete GPU, so the real number for a GPU-less system is probably around 40 or 50w at idle.

If that is accurate, you could potentially replace your i7-2600 with a used Dell Wyse 5070 thin client from ebay for about $40 (in the US), and that idles at 5w, which would only cost you $5 a year at the same rate.

Older thin clients and laptops tend to have much better idle power draws compared to desktops. For other people reading this, if you're using a desktop for a low-power use case, it's probably worth finding out what its idle power consumption is and doing the calculation to determine if it'd be worth replacing it with a more efficient used thin-client or office mini-pc.

[–] eleitl@lemmy.zip 5 points 5 days ago (1 children)

In Germany consumer power is something like 0.4 EUR/kWh, so economics of running power-hungry hardware might be different. Solar PV might change the equation once again.

[–] randombullet@programming.dev 3 points 5 days ago (1 children)

Then you'll need to factor in the solar initial cost as well!

[–] eleitl@lemmy.zip 1 points 5 days ago* (last edited 4 days ago)

DIY few kWp solar payback is about 2 years.