Tech Power Consumption

[Anonymous 11]

I added some more equipment to my test bench and fired up the watt meter to check it out. With everything turned on, I’m running a 500 watt room heater in the middle of a South Georgia Summer one room over from my AC thermostat.

I’ve run much bigger power hogs in enterprise. I once had the fun of running 5 kilowatts stuffed in a closet. Stupid PHBs do stuff like that. We used to blow up those sorry ass split unit ACs every August. They finally coughed up for the split units after the chronic 95+ temps in the server closet took out one server with two drive failures on a RAID 5 array. I’ve never dropped so many F-bombs to an executive in my life. I even had another single drive fail while I was yelling at him.

The same company would not even bat an eye over the salesmen’s $5000 dinners.

[RennieParticipant]

I’ve got an Octane II here with a 747W power supply. The size and weight of the power supply alone is somewhere between a large brick and a cinder block.

[Anonymous 3]

I know the feel. I run a dual CPU rig as my home workstation PC, with two GPU and 4 HDD in Raid array. It may go up to a 500 or more watts, 1200 watt PSU plus 2 monitors. The case has like 7 fans with dust filters, of those are 5 pieces of 12 cm (4.72 inch) 2000 RPM ball bearing fans, very loud on full speed. And heat comes out on the back like as it had an afterburner…

[Anonymous 11]

My power pig is a dual quad Xeon Dell PowerEdge with all drive bays filled running up to 300 watts draw. One day I’m going to give it a real hard workout and see how much she draws. Dual hot swapable 750 watt PS units drive it. That thing has some serious I/O though. I only run it for updates, config tests or data conversion jobs.

Usually, you draw about half of the PS rating. GPUs are serious power pigs too.

Most of the time, I’ll sit my laptop in the tech room and RDP into it from the office desktop. Way less heat.

It’s so hot and humid now that I can really notice it when I use that server. It starts a feedback loop with my AC. I’ll either work it early AM or at night with that room’s windows open to vent the heat with a running fan.

[Anonymous 42]

One of my welders is 26,000 watts (110amp@ 240v), has it’s own 200amp service and weighs more than Lincoln 460cid.
It’s needed when welding aluminum.
During the zombie apocalypse I can use it as one hell of a high voltage electric fence transformer! AM radio waves are conquered for mile around when this puppy is singing, it has that high voltage low pitch to high pitch hum when first powered up. I don’t have a generator that can run it, 10,000 watts isn’t enough..

[Anonymous 11]

Damn Tower, that’d be one hell of an electric fence. I’m sure the power cables are very impressive.

My USB to RS232 adapter just arrived so the server will be used less now. At least the thunderstorm will cool things down this evening.

[Author]

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