Geekularity

I have several servers which run 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, and I’ve always been curious just how much it costs me to keep them fed! Unfortunately I’ve only been able to estimate their appetite based on each system’s wattage rating, and my PG&E bill.

Computers have power management systems and sleep modes which make their consumption rates vary from hour to hour. So, it’a difficult to estimate the true power usage. In order to measure the consumption over time I would have to spend some serious cashola to either add a dedicated electrical meter or to buy some sophisticated lab equipment. I wasn’t that curious! It wasn’t until a month ago, I stumbled across this little beauty:

It’s the Kill-A-Watt consumer appliance meter and it is brilliant! Essentially the creators combined a digital multi-meter with a stop watch and wrapped it into a $30.00 package. I have now monitored my cluster of servers for a month and I can safely say that my power bill, just for this equipment averages about $48.00 not including air conditioning. I do plan to change out the fans both for noise and for power consumption and see if I can knock a few dollars off of this monthly line item.

Stay tuned, I’m going to start measuring some of my other electronics and I’ll post the results!

Server Stats:

• 1 PIII 1GHz with 2 disk drives, & 3 fans
• 1 PIII 700MHz with 1 disk drive & 3 fans
• 1 P4 3.6GHz HT with 2 disk drives, tape backup, & 4 fans.
• 1 P4 3.4GHz HT with 2 disk drives & 4 fans.
• Monitor is usually turned off

Other electronics:

• 1 DSL Router
• 1 Fast Ethernet switch
• 1 VoIP termination unit
• 1 KVM switch
• 2 UPS battery units which trickle charge the batteries when on AC power.

Average Energy Consumption: .42 KW/H