The Cost of 24/7: Tracking Home Lab Power with Shelly
The article discusses the author's journey to track the power consumption of his home servers. Initially unsure of the actual electricity costs, he explored various tools before settling on a Shelly smart plug for accurate monitoring. The author developed a custom exporter to integrate the data into his existing Prometheus/Grafana setup, allowing for real-time tracking of power usage and costs.
- ▪The author manages two home servers and initially had no idea about their electricity costs.
- ▪After experimenting with different tools, he chose a Shelly Plug M Gen3 for its API support and privacy features.
- ▪He created a custom exporter to visualize power usage and financial costs in real-time using Prometheus and Grafana.
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Home » Posts » Home Server SetupThe Hidden Cost of 24/7: Tracking Home Lab Power with ShellyMay 17, 2026 · 4 min · Veerendra K | Suggest ChangesTable of ContentsIntroductionThe Hunt for DataFinding the Right Hardware: ShellyShelly Device Exporterveerendra2/shelly_device_exporterDashboard & ConfigurationConclusionIntroduction#As you might know, I manage two home servers for various self-hosted services. I keep everything organized in a GitOps way using ComposeFlux—a tool I built to handle Docker Compose stacks when I got tired of manual updates. (You can read about that journey in GitOps for Homeservers (Part 1)).Recently, I was catching up with a colleague at the office. We were talking about self-hosting, and I mentioned that I run Immich to completely replace Google Photos.
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Excerpt limited to ~120 words for fair-use compliance. The full article is at Github.
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