At the cost of power consumption. My small homelab is already at 600Ws which is around 290$/mo in california.

I prefer to just not think about it and blame charging my car. Also in Cali.

I don't know if I'd buy any of the servers or older computers but the internal components are pretty dang good. Stuff like hard drives, network cards, hbas, that's the real money saver right there.

For sure.

I upgraded my home rack to use cx3 cards, and I sport a ds4246 that has a single 18tb sas hard drive in it lol.

Kind of cool I have 56gbps network between them, tho I can only get 30gbps at max in iperf3 lol (due to some pcie bw limit)

I think that’s off by a factor of 10.

What direction

Is there a particular reason you're in California?

Work.