> A typical consumer router will take up something like 5-10 watts.

You demonstrate a good worst case, but the article writer wants to use more than 10 gb/s so he can't actually use your typical router, he can have 15 gb/s with the MikroTik CCR2004-1G-12S which has an unknown idle W and a max around 50W.

Looking into the problem, I can't really determine why I should upgrade to 10 or 25 gb/s, but if I wanted to do so now I would rather buy components I could reuse than buy a router that will be inefficient for its entire service life.

Oh my I wish those $0.10 kWh... in here we have 3 prices through the day (depends on what time it is), and the cheapest one is already higher than that :)

Anyway I did the math and it would be $7/month. More than double your estimation, but still not horrendous. Although for that range of prices one might be able to find a managed instance machine in some cloud provider...

(edit: somewhere in the process I lost track of the fact this was a price _difference_ calculation, so it's adding $7 to whatever was already the cost with a more power efficient machine, which ofc. depends on number and type of HDs and other equipment)

The real difference is in latency: I tend to use the same operator on the fixed and mobile line, with Wireguard. SSH, SMB and Matrix respond almost as if you were in LAN.

If I add the cost for bandwidth and storage of a data center, then the economic choice is obvious.

Would it be efficient to store power when price is low?

Add HDDs and 10 GBit/s hardware and you surely reach 60 watts or more idling. Many home labs also don't use the newest hardware but old server hardware (add 10 - 40 watt idle).

A NUC or other Laptop hardware on the other hand would be OK to run. Maybe SSD raids are (financially) feasible for everyday files in the near future.

You are lucky to pay only $0.10. Here (Germany) I pay 0.30 Euro per kW/h. About $0.36 dollars.

I turned off my home NAS a few months back and partially switched to VPS services (also because of the better connection).

> Many home labs also don't use the newest hardware but old server hardware (add 10 - 40 watt idle).

Yes, but switching to newer, more efficient hardware is not free, so you need to factor this in when considering a switch. Also, in case you don't only care about your wallet but also environmental impact it's getting even more complicated, since manufacturing your new shiny toy definitely is polluting the environment somewhere in Asia, gets shipped via ship burning horribly dirty fuel in international waters etc.

If you don't have any use for the old hardware, chances are it will end up burning on some open field somewhere in Africa after local recyclers already extracted the good stuff...

"your new shiny toy definitely is polluting the environment somewhere in Asia"

Thats true whether I use dropbox or my own server