Your homelab may be costing more to run than it needs to. Here's why separating essential services from your lab can save electricity.

Every year or two I go through a review of all the things my homelab was running, to cut it down to a minimum number of servers / services that I considered necessary at the time.

I also went through purchasing low power consumption little machines with plenty of RAM (at the time) since memory was much more of a restriction than processing power for what I was running.

Inevitably, it all expands over time, necessitating another review after the electricity bills have noticeably risen again.

With the current RAM shortage / prices and second hand server prices, I'm back to multiple small machines. Either way, there are benefits and drawbacks.

I have two machines that are off by default. One powers on when overnight electricity prices are cheap and turns off again before the end of the window, and another is only switched on when the service is necessary.

I'm lucky enough to have solar and a house battery, so power isn't anywhere near as much of an issue, but what I've learned about myself is that I still like to optimize; I'm still a min-maxer.