Our colleagues from hard zone They have configured an old Mini PC as a server and have made measurements to calculate what the approximate monthly consumption would be and its impact on the electricity bill if we left it on 24/7.
Advantages of creating your server
Most of the users purchase a Mini PC with the intention of making a desktop PC with low power consumption and cheaper initial cost. However, they also have an immediate utility, especially on devices with already old hardware: turning them into a server. Turning the Mini PC into a file server is like having our own personal mini cloud for store all our digital files and be able to synchronize them.
Mini PCs are really comfortable to use due to their small size and have some advantages such as the consumption so low in comparison with a desktop computer to use.
Mounting one as a server is a possibility, so when you need a device connected 24 hours a day You might think that this is going to be a fairly high supplement to your electricity bill, but nothing is further from the truth.
Monthly cost on the electricity bill
taking as example a Mini PC with a TDP (thermal design power) of 35 wattswe are going to calculate an average of how much extra would be paid in the electricity bill for having this hardware acting as a server.
With the Mini PC running, but with nothing else connected than the network cable necessary (without peripherals or monitor), a wall measurement can give us a result of 14 watts in these conditions.
With the measurement of 14 watts, we can start to do the math. These assume a consumption of 0.014 kWh, which, being permanently on, translates into 0.336 kWh. Therefore, per month we would have to multiply by 30 and this would be 10.08 kWh per month.
Obviously, the price of energy varies a lot and there is a wide variety of rates, so we are going to take as a reference a rate without hourly discrimination in which you pay 0.174 euros/kWh with VAT included. Making the final account, having this Mini PC as a server on 24/7 costs us approximately 1.75 euros per month as long as the average consumption of 14 watts is maintained.