In 2018, I decided to build a server to run at home which marked the start of my “homelab” journey. I wanted a machine I could test services on without risking “real” computers. I installed the Proxmox virtual machine hypervisor and generally have about 10 virtual machines running on it at any time.
I wanted a machine which would use a somewhat low amount of power. I opted for a Corsair smart power supply which reports power consumption over USB. In addition, I am using a Corsair Commander Pro which is a piece of hardware which gives me good control over the fans and gives the system 4 ambient temperature sensors.
I use some software called Corsair Link running in a Windows VM which collects data from my Corsair hardware and saves the data into a file. I wrote a script which continuously monitors this file for changes and sends the changes via MQTT to Node-RED (also running on the server in a VM).
The data is regularly pushed to a service I wrote called IoTPlotter where I can monitor the power consumption, temperatures, and fan speeds of the server at any time.
Overall, the system consumes around 105 watts under average conditions.