It's a little under $0.12 per kWh here. I haven't gotten around to putting up a meter on it since fully completing it, but in the past, with a bit over half the drives + all of the ram and everything else, it was peaking a bit over 400w -- I'd guess like +- 700ish right now?

So, give or take, with a stupid build like mine, here, it's like .7 * 720 * $0.118 = ~$60.

Another thing to note is that mine stay spinning instead of idling for much lower energy consumption, cause I've always read that the stop-start cycle is what really tends to kill the drives.

I think it could be a lot more affordable/justifiable with:

- fewer, larger drives (6-8TB each?)

- fewer, larger DIMMs (16-32GB each?)

- perhaps slower, more energy-efficient drives (5400rpm?)

Also, I have seen some of the Atom C2750/C2758 boards for fairly cheap here.

If you don't need an absurd amount of RAM/PCIe/CPU, that could be a good option to save another bit of power.

> and my house is poorly oriented for solar panels unfortunately.

And yeah, same, unfortunately. Ironically, despite being in Florida, I barely get any sun; my entire neighborhood is filled with massive trees, lol.

I'd still like to look into solar at some point when I've got more time & money, though. It's been awful the past couple of hurricane seasons because of the trees -- something always seems to fall and cause a bunch of damage, so I'd like to cut down a few of the scary ones anyway (I am sorry trees!)