Tons of 25mm fans, dual socket, and a bunch of sticks of RAM add up.
I'm not trying to say they sip power, just that not every rack server is going to bankrupt you from power in most parts of CONUS, nor is a 1U guaranteed to be a screaming banshee. Assuming you had three of them, and nothing else, 300W over a month is still only $50/month with $0.25/kWh, which is about as high as I think it gets anywhere. The average is about half that. While not cheap, if you can afford a rack and three servers, you can probably afford the power.
If you're in the UK where it's somewhere around double that, then yeah maybe it's not really worthwhile.
It's also of course worth pointing out that for most employers, the useful skills you can get from a homelab can also be had from EC2s. Even if your job does run a datacenter, it's highly likely that they already have an infra team whose job it is to deal with the hardware.
I'm not trying to say they sip power, just that not every rack server is going to bankrupt you from power in most parts of CONUS, nor is a 1U guaranteed to be a screaming banshee. Assuming you had three of them, and nothing else, 300W over a month is still only $50/month with $0.25/kWh, which is about as high as I think it gets anywhere. The average is about half that. While not cheap, if you can afford a rack and three servers, you can probably afford the power.
If you're in the UK where it's somewhere around double that, then yeah maybe it's not really worthwhile.
It's also of course worth pointing out that for most employers, the useful skills you can get from a homelab can also be had from EC2s. Even if your job does run a datacenter, it's highly likely that they already have an infra team whose job it is to deal with the hardware.