It's important to bear the financial burden of running a home lab or smart home in mind when configuring one. You can quickly experience runaway costs when adding more hardware and software to the mix. Thankfully, it's easy to not only track how much electricity is being used by specific devices, but also limit it slightly to ensure you're not wasting more resources. Think about it, you're charged per kWh by energy suppliers, so the more power drawn from outlets, the higher your monthly statement will be.

Although they may not seem like they add much to the overall power draw of your home, even smart bulbs can have a cumulative effect with other devices to make quite a difference. Being smart when it comes to running self-hosted apps and services means you're saving as much money as possible. I've applied some upgrades to do just that, so read on if you're in the same boat and happen to be watching all the pennies.

The power of smart plugs

View, cut, and save

Smart plugs were largely seen as an afterthought and something you simply added to toggle some device on and off. But these handy little products offer more functionality, thanks to many of them coming equipped with advanced monitoring features to track precisely how much current is being drawn by connected devices. This makes the plug invaluable in one's quest to crush phantom power drain and see how much their home lab and smart home equipment actually drains from the house circuits. I've used smart plugs on servers, PCs, and more to offer insight into how much power is being drawn.

This has enabled me to make smarter savings on hardware, when it runs, and for how long. Pair these with thermostatic sensors, and I now have a smart heating system per room. Depending on which smart plug you purchase, they can even act as Zigbee repeaters, allowing your network of Internet of Things (IoT) to reach further throughout the home. Finally, they're solid for cutting power to anything that may continue drawing small amounts even when "off."

Smart-controlled radiators

Farewell, central heating

Our English cottage is very old and doesn't have a boiler, be it gas or oil. This means we rely solely on electricity for hot water and heating. On one hand, this is great since we plan to deploy countless solar panels and battery storage to make the most of green energy, and this reduces our carbon footprint. It also means we don't have water pipes throughout the home, which could cause a leak. The primary drawback to electric heating is cost. Even more advanced oil or electric radiators consume a lot of power to generate heat.

That's where smart plugs and basic temperature sensors come into play. Running through Zigbee, these handy devices feed data to Home Assistant, which can then be configured to adjust temperatures accordingly, depending on whether someone is present in the room and if a window is open. For instance, should our primary bedroom radiator be active and the window is opened, Home Assistant will command the smart plug to cut power immediately to save electricity. Everything is based on scheduling, too, so we can more accurately heat parts of the house.

A downgrade could be an upgrade

Bigger is not always better

It's easy to get lost in the world of building bigger as better, but that couldn't be further from the truth, especially if you build smartly. Take the home lab, for instance. You'd typically see people running huge racks with servers or beefy network-attached storage (NAS) enclosures, but do you really require that much performance and storage headroom? Probably not, which is why some are replacing their inefficient systems with mini PCs and single-board computers (SBCs) where possible. This can help reduce power draw and shouldn't impact what you can use your home lab or smart home for.

Then there's the whole argument for and against consolidation. Either you can go down the route of building an overkill system to manage everything for your home in one location, or dedicate specific tasks to different systems, which can help avoid the issue of downtime due to hardware or software faults. Running a Proxmox datacenter from home with a few mini PC nodes can provide some degree of redundancy, particularly if you have system resources to spare across the network. Whether having five or so mini PCs would draw less power than a single server depends on what you plan to use everything for.

I'm currently planning around dropping the Threadripper server for some mini PCs. The only issue I have is running Frigate and Ollama with Open WebUI. I'm going to need a dedicated system for both with enough RAM and support for external GPUs with LLMs.

Make sure you're saving money

Some solutions involve seeing how much data you use, like my example with smart plugs. But make sure you're not placing too heavy an emphasis on graphs. Data can look good, but if it's not actively helping you save power (and money), then it's almost worthless. I no longer feel the need to turn down services and hardware to ensure we're not damaging our monthly budget with utility bill costs. Sometimes it's small changes that make notable differences, but so long as you're smart with technology, upgrades such as the ones I listed here can go a long way.