[ananonymoususer]

I did this 20 years ago and ran the server for about 10 years. I down-scaled the server hardware when I transitioned to solar, but soon discovered that the low-power server just could not keep up with the demand. I upgraded to something in the middle that could handle a decent number of web users while still not using all the solar. I had 1280W of panels (16x80), a 1500W inverter, and three deep-cycle 12V 50AH batteries.

The remnants of the system can still be seen here: http://jsl.com/solar

[masklinn]

What was the demand? 1200W seems like a lot, https://solar.lowtechmagazine.com runs on a 50W solar panel with a 168W lead-acid battery (non-deep-cycle so effectively 84Wh).

However it gets to have fully static content, and benefits from relatively modern hardware: for under 2W it runs on a dual-core 1GHz ARM with 1GB RAM (and a 16GB SD card but it doesn't use anywhere near 16GB).

[lazide]

Keep in mind, 1200w would be maximum peak power consumption most likely (as you need to size for that, depending on how many seconds the chosen inverter could sustain above peak). A good sized gaming rig would require that type of peak consumption, even if 99% of the time it’s consumption maybe be zero.

[bryceacc]

1200w is pretty insane even for a gaming rig unless it had dual GPU in SLI. any normal rig will be fine with maybe a 750w psu and even at full benchmark power it would only draw 600w of that

my 5800x and 3070 when benchmarking draws ~540w, playing any games draws ~350w so that is the max i would realistically ever use at a constant rate

oh and "idle" is a disgusting 200w draw, desktops are crazy

[ananonymoususer]

The normal CPU draw was on the order of 500W. Given that you only get full power from the panels for ~8 hours per day, the rest went into the batteries. I didn't actually run on batteries unless the mains was down. It was built as a "solar UPS" so the batteries were always kept charged when possible.

There is a long story behind this project. The gist is that my power was crap because the last leg was a 40 year old 4KV transformer and the power demands of the neighborhood outpaced capacity. When I first reported this to the power company, they thought I was a loon. None of the neighbors were complaining so I must be some kind of nut job (with a strong math/electronics background and several years experience working in power systems, before switching to satellites). Anyway, after a few months of nagging them, I got their attention and they assigned me a power quality engineer. He came out with a RVM (recording volt meter), but he (deliberately?) misconfigured it so it filled up its recording buffer within a few minutes instead of the one week period upon which he would return and collect it. So of course he found nothing wrong and I must be crazy. I needed reliable power so I built the solar UPS. After building the monitor and control system for it, I had a few spare data acquisition channels so I scaled the AC mains on one of them and made a web page for it.

When all of that was working, I emailed a hyperlink of the AC mains history chart to the power engineer who had ignored me. Within just a few hours I got a call from his boss, who offered to use my house as a load regulation point for their sorry ass power grid. (This was in an affluent suburb of LA so no excuse.) Apparently they did not like the fact that (even though I never published the link anywhere else) I was advertising to the world that the power grid was fluctuating by more than +/- 10% when the NEC says it SHALL not fluctuate by more than +/- 5%. Service was pretty good after that.

A few years later the power company replaced the final leg with a 16KV transformer and service has been excellent since then. Thus, no more need for the solar UPS system, which was taken down about seven years ago to get the roof re-done.

[masklinn]

That's a great story and it does flesh out the original requirements, thanks for writing it up.

[louwrentius]

Site seems down?

https://web.archive.org/web/20160401215358/http://www.jsl.co...

[junon]

Probably hugged a bit, it works for me.

[the-dude]

Link is dead. So how much did the upgraded server draw?

[ananonymoususer]

See above.