renstur@coopnet:~/blog$ ls -lt ./topics/homelab-cost/
homelab-cost/
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What the NAS costs to keep spinning
I measured my TrueNAS box at 81 W before touching spindown. The waste wasn't the disks. It was a Pascal GPU left without a driver by 25.10 and two blank USB drives. Spindown doesn't suit a pool that hosts apps, so I put a community driver back on the card and left the disks alone.
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Pricing an always-on homelab load at the rate it actually pays
The boxes that never turn off should be priced at my top tier, all in rate, not the dashboard's blended average, which always runs low. Average watts times 730 over 1000 gives kWh a month. In Home Assistant that's an Integral helper, a billing cycle utility meter and one template.