Still less than renting the same amount of compute. Somewhere between several months and a couple years you pull ahead on costs. Unless you only run your lab a few hours a day.
My Pi CM4 NAS with a PCIe switch, SATA and USB3 controllers, 6 SATA SSDs, 2 VMs, 2 LXC containers, and a Nextcloud snap pretty much sits at 17 watts most of the time, hitting 20 when a lot is being asked of it, and 26-27W at absolute max with all I/O and CPU cores pegged. €3.85/mo if I pay ESB, but I like to think that it runs fully off the solar and batteries :)
That’s rough. What’s your progress on renewables? Wind has made electricity really cheap in my state and I would think Ireland would be pretty windy (esp offshore)?
Ireland has had hydro for a century[1], and wind and tidal are productive here. There are wind farms EVERYWHERE around where I live (mountains, Cork/Limerick border). There are solar farms, as well, but sun is not our strong suit. Trouble for individuals is that small, affordable wind turbines are basically useless, and most people don't have hundreds of thousands of Euros plus planning permission to erect megawatt-scale units, so solar is pretty much it.
Not if you run it idle a lot; most commercial blade servers suck down a lot of power. I think a niche where Pi blades can work is for a learning cluster, like in schools for HPC learning, network automation, etc.
It's definitely not suited for production, but there, you won't find old blade servers either (for the power to performance issue).
