Powering a web server
I recently purchased an upgrade to the web server hosting www.qicboy.com. The old power supply boasted 380W. The new one says it can support 600W. Wow, I thought, that's a whole lot of juice. It's no wonder Google is scrambling to find creative ways of dealing with their power consumption problems. If I leave this thing on over the course of a month, how much power is it going to consume? I'm pretty sure these machines don't use anywhere near as much power as they're rated for but I'm curious what the numbers are in a worst case scenario. In fact, this is a totally hypothetical worst case scenario and is flawed by the simple fact that I don't think I have enough components in the machine to consume the 600W the power supply is able to provide. If I were able to consume the maximum amount of power, the numbers would look something like this.
Sprout2 with a 380W power supply. (0.38 kWh * 24hrs * 30 days) = 274 kWh in one month.
Sprout3 has a 600W power supply. (0.6 kWh * 24hrs * 30 days) = 432 kWh in one month.
I'm not sure where my power comes from exactly, but let's assume the worst, and say that it comes from some power plant that uses fossil fuel. According to treehugger.com, 1KWh produced 1.5 lbs of CO2. Here's what the CO2 consumstion of that new server looks like. That's 648 lbs of CO2 released into the atmosphere if the energy is produced with fossil fuel.
(1.5 lbs * 432 kWh) = 648 lbs of CO2
Again, the estimated power consumption is in my mind, totally unrealistic. That's more power than my house uses in a whole month. My electric company uses a tiered system to charge you for electricity. If you consume below a certain amount they charge you a certain amount per KWh. They call this a baseline. If you exceed the baseline they charge the difference at a different rate. They have various tiers that they charge you at.
baseline amount = (403.2 KWh * $0.11430) = $46.09 101-130% amount = (32 KWh * $0.12989) = $ 4.16 Total monthly cost = $50.25
This whole process has piqued my interest in how much these machines actually use so I'm looking into ordering a Kill-A-Watt gadget from P3 to help me figure that out.
1200 electric shaves (> 3 years), slice 100 breads, dry your hair 15 times, 4 TV evenings, listen to 15 CDs, Use a small refrigerator for 24 hours, 20 microwave meals, drill 250 holes, 4 evenings of light with 60 W incandescent lamps or 20 evening of light with 11 W compact fluorescent light. [ Treehugger]