The only brand new, 10gbe managed switches that I can find for less than 60 bucks are off-brand chinese junk. No thank you.

As far as electricity cost goes? After doing that math, it might cost me a dollar fifty a year to use. That machine sitting on the bottom is a much bigger chunk than the switch itself, as it has 6 7200rpm SAS drives in it. Plus it’s a Xeon E3 CPU.

Those drives, each, use as much electricity as that switch does, even before considering the CPU itself.