Have you ever wondered what it costs to power your home lab or even just your home network? Most probably don’t even think about it. To some, it’s no different than running another refrigerator, furnace, or keeping a couple of light bulbs on all the time.
Most homes have a Cable / DSL modem, a home gateway router, and may be an access point. For most the gateway router and access point are combined into one single device that is able to provide coverage for the entire apartment, condo, or home.
There are those of us with either larger homes, more challenging living environments, or those of us with home labs that require more equipment running for extended periods of time.
There are probably thousands of configurations and combinations of different vendors, models, run-times, and electrical loads placed on the home network and home network lab installations so I will only be quantifying my own home and lab network. I hope that this provides some awareness of the energy costs associated with having extra network and compute always running in your home and/or home lab.
How to Measure electrical usage?
The cost of your Internet Service is not that important here. It costs what you are willing to pay for the service that you feel you require.
What most people don’t factor in is the electrical cost of their home network and / or home network lab.
There are several ways to measure the amount of electricity your home network equipment is using. This could be using some sort of smart plug that measures electrical usage like the Belkin Wemo Insight Smart plug (pictured below)
or something like a Kill A Watt (pictured below) 
As long as you can gather accurate electrical run time information the only other thing you need is the kWh cost from your electrical bill.
What is in my lab?
My lab spans across two locations in my house. My Basement which has my main equipment rack and then my office which is on the main floor.
My lab equipment that was running for the last 30 days is as follows:
Basement
UPS: Tripp lite 1500VA Rackmount UPS
Spectrum Cable Modem (Ubee OEM)
Meraki MX67C Security Appliance
Meraki MS120-24P Switch
Meraki MS225-24P Switch
Meraki MR53 Access Point
Meraki MR30H Access Point
Meraki MR36 Access Point
Meraki MV71 Security Camera
Meraki MV21 Security Camera
Meraki MV12w Security Camera
Meraki MV12we Security Camera
Meraki MV72 Security Camera
Office
UPS: CyberPower 1500 VA UPS
Intel Nuc 6th Gen microcomputer (running 4 Virtual Machines)
Cisco DX80 Video Endpoint
Samsung 28″ UHD Display
Meraki MS220-8P Switch
Apple MBP 13″ Laptop
Apple MBP 15″ Laptop
Various accessories like phone chargers and USB microphones
The Breakdown
My home and the home lab are located in Wisconsin. My electricity is supplied by WE Energies. They supply gas and electricity to portions of Wisconsin and the Michigan Upper Peninsula. Currently, the cost of the electricity they supply is roughly at a cost of $0.137 per kWh. There is more to it than that with facilities and meter fees but we will focus on the kWh cost.
I monitored both the Basement and Office parts of my lab with a Kill A Watt. I monitored each for 30 days. I only have one Kill A Watt so I monitored each for 30 days and then added them together to get to a total cost. The kWh difference between the two months was negligible.
Basement
30 days of runtime consuming 111kWh @ $0.137kWh = ~$15.21
Office
30 days of runtime consuming 58kWh @ $0.137/kWh = ~$7.95
In total my lab is costing me ~ $23.16/month in electricity.