proskater123 Posted December 23, 2009 Share Posted December 23, 2009 So I was watching some videos on Google's Web servers And I really liked the idea of every server having there own battery pack hooked up to the power supply. I was wondering if there was a power supply already out there like this or if I have to mod an exsisting one. Another idea I had was building a power station before it gets tomy racks. I saw a guide on how to build one but i figured i would get some info and ideas. I want to have the greenest power solution for the cheapest price. Plus I would love the idea of my servers still being up when the power goes out. A guide that I found and thought was really interesting was: http://www.wikihow.com/Build-Your-Own-Unin...le-Power-Supply I found some solar panels on amazon for about 50 bucks i was thinking of ways to throw them into an equation. http://www.amazon.com/Solar-Power-Panel-Vo...r/dp/B000R944C4 Any ideas, thoughts, suggestions? Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
icepuck Posted December 24, 2009 Share Posted December 24, 2009 If you use a DC-DC power supply you wont have to buy an expensive inverter. How are you planning on using solar? as a backup or a total off grid setup? You could also use wind as well. Home depot now has solar panels. I tried to run my samba box(P2 450) from solar and found it maxed out at 108watts during bootup and about 90 watts running setti@home. My 3 us-64(192watts) solar panels run things during the day but two 50Ahr(100Ahr total) deep cycle batteries are not enough to run at night. On cloudy days like today I get only 15 watts. So, if you start off with low power components you wont have to spend as much on the rest the system. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
proskater123 Posted December 24, 2009 Author Share Posted December 24, 2009 What I was kinda thinking was running it from a ups and some how have the solar panels fill the ups during the day, and then at night it switch over to the regular grid. I was thinking about hooking up some 12 volt batterys in line so that I could get longer use out of the ups. I also want all of this to be a failover incase the power goes out. At the moment I have 3 rackmont servers http://www.weirdstuff.com/cgi-bin/item/62017 each using 320 watt power supplys. And then another server running about 300 watts. Other than that I have a load balancer, switch, and router to power. Not to much to power. I'll have my moniter ran off of something else so incase anything happens its not pulling power from the array. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Sparda Posted December 24, 2009 Share Posted December 24, 2009 Solar panels aren't reliable and don't generate much electricity (relative to other source, relative to a lemon with a piece of copper and zinc they generate loads) a wind turbine (or two) would be more effective but still lacks reliability, they are also much more expensive. Ultimately you are going to have to use a diesel, petrol, hydrogen* or (insert other combustible here) generator in case the mains is out, there is no sun/wind and the batteries are dead. *Hydrogen is actually really interesting, you can use a form of electrolysis to generate it your self from water. So you could, in fact, use the solar panels/wind turbines to charge batteries then use all the excess they are generating that is not powering the racks to make hydrogen. Though this process is highly inefficient in terms of the energy used to make the hydrogen verse the amount of energy burning the hydrogen produces, but the energy in hydrogen can be stored far more compactly (compressed in canisters) than the energy stored in batteries. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
VaKo Posted December 24, 2009 Share Posted December 24, 2009 You could do it like a guy who used to live near me and hook up your house to a street lamp. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
proskater123 Posted December 24, 2009 Author Share Posted December 24, 2009 You could do it like a guy who used to live near me and hook up your house to a street lamp. Why not just run an extension cord to my neighbors house and plug into there christmas lights? I am probably going to do something like this: http://gizmodo.com/362928/how-to-power-you...h-car-batteries for my power backup. I have everything i need except the batterys. I'll have to save up some and get 2, 4, 6, or 8 deepcycle batterys and run sets of them in parrelell. My power outages are usally no longer than a couple hours so this should in theroy save me from my rack shutting down. I am tempted to go take my cars batterys and try this. But I think I am going to wait and buy some new batterys. Now just a clean energy efficent way to charge them. maby even a way to run my rack completly off of them. :P jk Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
VaKo Posted December 24, 2009 Share Posted December 24, 2009 Its easier than digging under the pavement from your cellar, I'll give you that. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
metatron Posted December 24, 2009 Share Posted December 24, 2009 You could build a wood gasifier and run that into a genrator as a back up. is an example of one Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
proskater123 Posted December 24, 2009 Author Share Posted December 24, 2009 That would be alot of wood to burn. I have a gas generator and it would be alot simpler to just use that. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
metatron Posted December 24, 2009 Share Posted December 24, 2009 That would be alot of wood to burn. I have a gas generator and it would be alot simpler to just use that. Wood is free. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
manuel Posted December 24, 2009 Share Posted December 24, 2009 mostly anyway :P Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
metatron Posted December 25, 2009 Share Posted December 25, 2009 mostly anyway :P When the world comes to an end or the oil and coal runs out, you will find me sat in my house in the woods, with running water, more than enough electricity to run a small town, supplies to last twenty years and a stock pile of weapons to rival a small dictatorship. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
icepuck Posted December 27, 2009 Share Posted December 27, 2009 When the world comes to an end or the oil and coal runs out, you will find me sat in my house in the woods, with running water, more than enough electricity to run a small town, supplies to last twenty years and a stock pile of weapons to rival a small dictatorship. You have hydro power? Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
jobdone Posted December 28, 2009 Share Posted December 28, 2009 When the world comes to an end or the oil and coal runs out, you will find me sat in my house in the woods, with running water, more than enough electricity to run a small town, supplies to last twenty years and a stock pile of weapons to rival a small dictatorship. - except for the fact you'll need to replace some bearings here and there and hope you don't freeze in winter :) seriously though most UPS's are just so you have enough time to safetly shut down the server , however I have seen fuses blown in UPS's causing more trouble than if there wasn't a UPS... Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Old Netware Posted January 16, 2010 Share Posted January 16, 2010 *Hydrogen is actually really interesting, you can use a form of electrolysis to generate it your self from water. So you could, in fact, use the solar panels/wind turbines to charge batteries then use all the excess they are generating that is not powering the racks to make hydrogen. Though this process is highly inefficient in terms of the energy used to make the hydrogen verse the amount of energy burning the hydrogen produces, but the energy in hydrogen can be stored far more compactly (compressed in canisters) than the energy stored in batteries. This is the Hydrogen system I built to heat a garage in northern Minnesota, it splits the Hydrogen and Oxygen and pumps each into separate tanks, then the Hydrogen was used through a propane heater. Cycled the generator between 20 to 60 psi, propane heat only needed 11 psi to work. Used solar to charge the battery about 20% of need, solar alone couldn't keep up with the demand of the generator. solar provided only 100 watts at peak. generator would use upward of 30 amps to run, oh and 30 amps would get the generator damn hot if ran too long (thats why we cycled it). Trivia; what part of the hydrogen use process is still a major issue/problem before public use? my system suffers too. Hint; even the new hydrogen cars suffer from this issue, it will cost you plenty to fix in a few years in those cars... Hint 2; Hydrogen is the smallest molecule... Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
beakmyn Posted January 16, 2010 Share Posted January 16, 2010 I would think that leakage and possibly trace minerals will be an issue. Nice system by the way. What do you figure the efficiency is? Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Old Netware Posted January 16, 2010 Share Posted January 16, 2010 I would think that leakage and possibly trace minerals will be an issue. Nice system by the way. What do you figure the efficiency is? Thanks; and the big issue is that since hydrogen is the smallest molecule, over time it will seep through what ever the storage medium material is and make it brittle. even the most advanced materials will break down within a few years and start falling apart. So those fancy tanks you see used for storage will still breakdown after several years.The higher the pressure, the faster this will happen. As to the efficiency; we were mainly working on proof of concept. A couple items that the efficiency is tied to is the electrode material and the electrolysis solution, we used standard carbon steel electrodes and many different solutions (lye is the bomb, but major caustic, be careful) oh, then the end of a 25 year marriage canceled forward progress on it, for the time being... On 4th of July's we did have fun filling large clear garbage bags with hydrogen and attaching long fuses... Then letting them go up over town, the concussion when it blew was the best... This system still exists, sitting in my fathers barn right now. The generator is on the right in the picture and the storage on the left. The generator uses a "W" bin configuration, it also has dryers, filters and flow meters. Right now I am building a HHO gas generator for one of my motorcycles. 30 sec burst, then let battery charge. Should help the old 1980 kz750 twin do some street fighter gigs at the lights still ;) The 1994 CB1000 is getting a turbo next :) Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Old Netware Posted January 16, 2010 Share Posted January 16, 2010 Hey and for your google style servers check this out. http://mini-itx.com/projects/cluster/?p I had seen this I while back and thought about trying something similar. Very well done for a 12 node distributed cluster. Distributed clusters is something I have enjoyed playing with. Years ago I had a 8 node setup with a beowulf cluster on them. it was 8 compaq deskpro's with pentium 200 Mhz and 64 MB ram each. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
HakShark Posted January 17, 2010 Share Posted January 17, 2010 OldNetware is now HakShark, Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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