[ale] Anyone out there?

[DJPfulio at jdpfu.com]

On 4/23/23 10:52, Solomon Peachy via Ale wrote:
> Hah, that's what I think when I see the various "home lab porn" photos
> on the /r/homelab subreddit -- it seems most of the folks there have an
> equipment/complexity fetish, and only try to come up with uses for all
> that gear well after they see their first power bill.  (/r/selfhosted
> falls under this same complexity acquisition syndrome too, and I say
> that as someone who's been selfhosting for.. geez, 25 years now..)
> 
> Not that I'm entirely immune from that problem -- But now that all of my
> equipment is back under one roof/site with <2Mbps Up DSL, a lot of the
> stuff I had running is now pointless/impractical, and there's no point in
> continuing to pay the power bill to keep it all online.

Every 10 yrs, I go through a consolidation exercise.

I'm down to 2 identical Ryzen 5600G systems (65W max) with just the storage being different.  These keep the power required low.  Just looked - last month's power bill was $75 for the house and that's higher than normal due to missing insulation for about the 25% of house.

I suppose gamers will have much higher bills due to the GPU requirement.

Self-hosting a number of VMs and containers - to keep data away from the data stealers/sellers.  Using cloudy services isn't in my cards.

Still using 2 raspberry pi (v2 and v3) systems for home theatre players. No extra laptops and those are seldom booted - been over a year already.

Recycled a bunch of old computer/monitors/TV stuff at a free recycling event 2 Saturday's ago.

Staples will provide a $10 in-store credit (paid monthly) if you 1-2 recycle old electronics devices each month.  Due to the way the payments happen, to get the most money, it requires visiting to drop off items in the first half of the month and coming back in the 2nd half to use the credit from the prior month before it expires.  Sad there isn't a Staples nearby that is convenient. There's an office depot/max just up the street.

Today, there's just not the need to have "servers" in your house. 2 redundant relatively low-power desktops can handle anything.

For those pondering retirement, what are you waiting for?

You can retire decades earlier by agreeing to reduce expenses.   https://www.nerdwallet.com/article/investing/early-retirement  Of course, early retirement isn't for everyone. We all have different priorities and expenses that cannot be avoided. There are also ramifications that most of the world doesn't consider - like tax credits don't really exist if your tax bill is very low.  SS benefits are impacted, if that matters to you.