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There are other power usage concerns beyond cost. For example, if a small room can't have air conditioning you might want only very low power devices to keep from heating it up.

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~35 watts isn't actually all that much heat load, and that's what you get from the likes of a business-class Core i5 at the loads routing packets would put on it (i.e. basically idle). Something like Atom or AMD Bobcat is <15 watts.

Another thing to keep in mind if you're worried about power/heat is that 3.5" spinning rust can pull >5 watts per spindle. I've seen 15K drives pull close to 20. But an SSD is close to nothing and so are most 2.5" laptop spindles.

I'll concede that a small closet can get pretty warm from even lower power devices. However, as long as the CPU isn't overheating and the space is clean and dry, it doesn't matter.

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