Yep, summer is over. Just got a $889.30 power bill for 4.077 MWh for an effective price of $0.218/kWh.
Solar production for last month was only 0.77 MWh and it's gonna keep falling for the rest of the year.
This comes out to an average continuous consumption of about 5.66 kW. Of this, about 1.5 are accounted for by the managed PDUs on the lab IT racks, which now feed all of the servers, switches, and devkits. (Breaking down further: 334W for storage cluster, 355W for VM servers, 559W for routers/switches, 210W for my friend's backup server, 47W for devkits).
An additional ~2.5 kW is used by the remainder of the lab, mostly T&M equipment, but is not accounted for in detail since I don't yet have managed PDUs on the other work benches.
The 559W of networking gear is quite a bit higher than I would like (costing just over $1K/yr in power). The cheap FS switch I replaced a failed legacy Cisco with is pulling 14W compared to 79-95W for the Ciscos depending on how many ports are up.
I'm very tempted to buy a couple more of the FS switches and retire the Ciscos later this year, rather than waiting for LATENTRED to be finished (replacing them with LATENTRED had always been the plan, but is taking its sweet time as I work on higher priority stuff).
I still have three of the old Ciscos in service. Preliminary calculations say that each one I replace will save roughly 575 kWh and $125 in power costs every year. The FS switches cost $425 after taxes and shipping, so that's about a 3.4 year payoff period assuming I depreciate the switches completely after that period. If I resell the switches after I replace them with my own designs, the effective cost of each will drop.
Andrew Zonenberg
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2026-10-08 13:58:59 UTC
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2026-10-08 13:58:59 UTCEvent JSON
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"content": "Yep, summer is over. Just got a $889.30 power bill for 4.077 MWh for an effective price of $0.218/kWh.\n\nSolar production for last month was only 0.77 MWh and it's gonna keep falling for the rest of the year.\n\nThis comes out to an average continuous consumption of about 5.66 kW. Of this, about 1.5 are accounted for by the managed PDUs on the lab IT racks, which now feed all of the servers, switches, and devkits. (Breaking down further: 334W for storage cluster, 355W for VM servers, 559W for routers/switches, 210W for my friend's backup server, 47W for devkits).\n\nAn additional ~2.5 kW is used by the remainder of the lab, mostly T\u0026M equipment, but is not accounted for in detail since I don't yet have managed PDUs on the other work benches.\n\nThe 559W of networking gear is quite a bit higher than I would like (costing just over $1K/yr in power). The cheap FS switch I replaced a failed legacy Cisco with is pulling 14W compared to 79-95W for the Ciscos depending on how many ports are up.\n\nI'm very tempted to buy a couple more of the FS switches and retire the Ciscos later this year, rather than waiting for LATENTRED to be finished (replacing them with LATENTRED had always been the plan, but is taking its sweet time as I work on higher priority stuff).\n\nI still have three of the old Ciscos in service. Preliminary calculations say that each one I replace will save roughly 575 kWh and $125 in power costs every year. The FS switches cost $425 after taxes and shipping, so that's about a 3.4 year payoff period assuming I depreciate the switches completely after that period. If I resell the switches after I replace them with my own designs, the effective cost of each will drop.",
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