So… Dan0 and I are looking for a new apartment since the rent at this place is going to be raised in july to an amount somewhere around $Texas. We’re looking in the Newton-ish area. A lot of these places have “all utilities included”. For a normal person with normal living habits, this is not a dangerous offer. But when a geek hears the words “Utilities included”, his brain processes it to “You may run all your machines at once if you’d like”. Assuming the wiring in the building can handle it, running all my servers at once would be interesting. Just my segment of the network has about 2500-3000 watts worth of computer power supplies. The one “end table” server counts as an electric heater too…
(Upon Seth, Amy, and I coming to my apartment to watch a video)
Me: “Damn, it’s hot in here”
Amy: “Why don’t you turn the heat off?”
Me: “We haven’t turned the heat on yet this year. It’s just that my “big” server has been running for a couple days.”
Seriously… people need to think before they offer up free electricity.
Often “utilities” just means heat and hot water…
Cretins! Electricity is a utility!! Clearly I will have to make sure that they will be supporting my habit before I lock in on anything =P
yea i would clarify info on that…..exsactly how much gadgets are we talking about?
One WinXP box @ 420 watts, a FreeBSD box @ 350 watts, a small Dolch LPAC-586 running OpenBSD acting as a firewall @ ~300 watts, a FreeBSD server with 6 P200 Pro processors and 12 hotswap SCSI drives (those things generate a TON of heat) @ 1000 watts, and one last FreeBSD server with 4 P166’s and 6 SCSI drives @ 500 watts. I have a plan in the works for one more server that probably wouldn;t break 300 watts if I get it running. If I have to pay for electricity I’ll probably only run two machines continuously (one as a firewall/router and one as a http/ftp server), and only flip on the Windows box when I need to do some gaming.
holy hell…and that doesn’t even include…ur fridge,tv,and any other household electrical appliances u have…jeez….
Indeed. Right now I only run one of those all the time, and it doesn’t suck much power. it’s acting as a router/firewall/multi-server but I’d really like to “decentralize” the duties for security reasons. So my power consumption is pretty frugal right now.
frugal??? and how much is “frugal”? u live by urself right? jeez. hows the new job btw? and that cute friend of urs? 😉
I don’t think they would give you free electricities either… if they did I bet your rent would go up or they would drop the free juice quick like!
And yes you and Dano have teh hot apt. :banana:
Yeah, my buddies and I lived in one of those “All utilites Included” apartment complexes, most of them put a cap on it though, and if you go over, you start getting little slips of paper on your front door saying you owe them money for exceeding your utilitiy cap or some BS like that.
Free Heat and AC
My apartment in Lawrence included free heat and AC in the form of a readily available 240 VAC line. Needless to say I didn’t run the AC all Summer and a 240 VAC to 120 VAC stepdown and UPS line conditioner ran my network operations center of about 10 machines.
Re: Free Heat and AC
You could have just told them it was your heating system =P. not terribly efficient, but it still counts as electric heat