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Testing Electrical Capacity of New Offices?
An anonymous reader asks: "Running a small graphic design studio, we've hit a snag that I'm sure many tech-reliant small businesses have hit before: our small flock of file servers, multi-processor machines and 22" monitors draws more electricity then the wiring in our current space can take. We're looking for a new space for this and other reasons, and as we look around we're generally forced to take the word of landlords as to what sort of amperage an electrical system can provide. Does anyone in the Slashdot community know a reliable way to test and see if an electrical system can support the needs of a computer-reliant business?"
Bringing a qualified electrician along when looking for new office space. Or at least having an electrician give it a looking over before you sign a lease. They should be able to look at the power coming into the building as well as the current distribution system within the building and give you some idea as to whether or not it could meet your needs.
Total available amperage to your offices doesn't always do you a whole lot of good if you can't get the circuits you need to your server rooms. Be sure to discuss with the landlord any plans you may have to add or move existing circuits around.
Ask to see the breaker box that holds the breakers to your office space. The amperage that will trip each breaker should be printed on it. If it's not clear which breakers go to your office space (perhaps because there's one big box for the building and it's not labeled well, or there are different boxes for each office and they're not labelled well, either), ask the landlord.
Put in the lease that the electrical system in they office space will have a capacity of X. Have a clause that says that if this isn't the case, the landlord will spend his own money to fix it in X weeks/months/etc, and if he doesn't then you get free rent until he does, as well as the option to break your lease without penalty. Be willing to pay an electrician to check that the max amperage of the space is what it's agreed to before you sign the lease, though. Also make sure the lease allows you to have an electrician come in and do said checking.
If you're really worried, put a significant penalty into the lease if the amperage is too low (I'm sure you don't want to move any more than you have to). You will probably have to pay a little extra for this. If your landlord balks at this, tell him to get an electrician who will back his work do the inspection, so that the electrician pays the penalty and the landlord doesn't.
Cover your butt. Bernard is watching.
Have everybody bring in their microwave when touring offices. When they say it'll support situation X have people walk out their car, grab microwave, and plug it in. See if they're still confident in supporting that load. If they are, flip 'em on.
Nothing beats proof you can actually see. Just figure out what how many microwaves you need to simulate your load.
most building unless they were build 50+ years ago should be fine. make sure your server room has a couple dedicated circuts so if you blow a fuse the whole thing wont go out. it all depends on what you have. 3 servers in a closet and 10+ machines in a 1000sq ft building with at least 6 dedicated circuts will be fine. if you are paranoid about it bring an electrician show him what you have and what type of building you are moving into.
One good dummy load would be a bag full of travel-size hair dryers. They pull roughly 1500-1700 W apiece, and they don't take much room. You could plug a whole bunch of them in and see if you lose breakers; if you have 5 KW of server demand I'd go for about 7 KW of dummy loads for testing.
Note that this is over and above checking the ampere ratings on the breakers for the circuits in question. You don't necessarily know what's upstream, but like any other part of your production system you want to stress-test it before you rely on it.
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Circuit breakers are labled by how much current they'll handle before they blow. Find out which circuit(s) are for your office and just take a look.
--Chris
I'd assume you're using CRT screens.
LCD's to the rescue!
A good 21" CRT is going to suck down 110watts+, an LCD will probably do 30...
Plus, If each of them are 4 square feet, thats 88 sq feet less office space, or one more cube.
Like others have said.. A qualified inspection will be best, just as if you were buying a home.
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You may also want to check how easy it will be to keep the rooms cool without adding too many electrical systems. If the airflow in the building isn't sufficient, you'll be drawing much more juice in summer.
Of course, depending on where you are, you may have the same issue in winter with isolation and portable heaters. If you use AMDs, this won't factor as an *extra* load, though.
Take a thin yet sturdy peice of metal, go into your kitchen, hold on to the faucet and then stick the metal into the hot part of the socket (usually on the right.) If you die or are seriously hurt, you have decent electricity. If not, you don't. Note: this will probably not work if you have a GFCI. In that case, take two pieces of metal and stick one into each part of the socket.
Do not take the landlord's word for anything. In your lease add language that you can cancel the lease in writing up to two week after it was signed if you determine the facility does not have XXX sustainable amps of electric service.
the other thing you have to remember is, each individual circuit might be able to support the load fine, but your load might be higher than the rating for your riser cable. if you have 10AMPs going on 10 circuits but your riser is only rated for 60AMPs, you're still SOL.
hire an electrician.
http://www.rayn.net . Funny. Stuff.
Take all your computer equipment with you to the office you're thinking of renting. Plug it all in, and leave it for an hour or so. If the building burns down, that's a bad sign -- find another site. Otherwise you should be ok.
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>>Ask to see the breaker box that holds the breakers to your office space. The amperage that will trip each breaker should be printed on it.
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Really?
If the last electrician "installed" extra breakers in anticipation of future needs, (i.e. you've got switches without connecting wires,) looking at the box won't do you any good.
This is another reason why you should have a licensed electrician test the required electrical capacity prior to signing a lease.
The last two facilities I was involved with had to be upgraded. The first, because when we installed UPS' the heat from the UPS' overwhelmed the air conditioning.
The second because when an open space was suddenly converted to cube space, employees brought in a boatload of space heaters and pop-goes-the-breakers.
With regard to landlords putting guarantees in the lease, good luck. Many will tell you it's between you and the local utility and the most they will do is provide their "best efforts."
What you can OFTEN do is have your licensed electrician kill two birds by scheduling a representative from your local utility to meet with him when he inspects the site. At that time, any problems with the local power distribution grid THAT THE LANDLORD MAY NOT KNOW ABOUT can be identified.
With regard to estimating your needs, a google searches that include btu, kwh, "load estimation", etc. provides lots of links to help you develop a spreadsheet of what you need.
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Go buy a handful of These. Each one in parallel should draw ~1.0-1.3 Amps across a power jack, and scare the living crap out of whoever's showing you the office.
Or if you're feeling cheap, use These but don't leave them powered for more than 5 seconds. (read the datasheet).
If you are moving into a new space, you should have a construction allowance built into the lease. This will cover reconfiguring the office space and changing the electrical & mechanical systems. Why worry about mechanical systems? Because if you are going to need an electrical upgrade due to increased power consumption, you will need upgraded HVAC.
Before the lease is signed, get a design done and get bids on the work. The bids will give an honest account of the suitability of the space. You can now back out or go forward. If you go forward, negotiate the lease terms and the maximum cost of construction.
The work gets the work done by contractors, bills get paid by the landlord, you pay for it in your lease and it comes under operating expenses instead of capital expenditures - your accountant will love you (after they curse you for the up front hassle)
"As God is my witness, I thought turkeys could fly." A. Carlson
Hire an electrician who has a Circuit Breaker Tester for a few hours. Plug the tester in an outlet, and it trips the breaker and measures how much current it took to trip the breaker. Then see how many other outlets lost power. Repeat until you either are sure you have enough power or all the outlets have been accounted for.
Oh, this is easy to fix. We had the same problem at a small 4-story office rental.
You need to bring in power from an outside source. Due to electrical codes, and the questionable ability of your existing wiring, I recommend the following procedure.
First, you need to rent some space in an adjacent property. Preferably at the same height from the street as your current property.
Then you need to buy 10-20 large microwave ovens, approx. 50 feet of copper tubing (like you can get at the hardware store), a set of wrenches and screwdrives, and 10-20 metal (not plastic) trash can lids.
Unfortunately I can't go into more details due to the gag order but I think you can figure it out.
Our power problems are solved. However we had to give up WiFi. On the plus side, our coffee is always hot!
Hope this helps.
You need a heavy duty multimeter. You can get one with a rating of about 20 amps AC for under $50. like this for example.
Hook the multimeter up with a variable resistor (also rated for 20 Amps) in series with the circuit you want to measure.
(+)-->resistor-->multimeter-->(-)
Open up the resistor (slowly) until the circuit breaker or the fuse goes. Note the amps that this happened at. That's your max.
Low power computers are becoming available. Do you really need P4s/Athalons, or can some VIA/Transmeta systems do the same job? Do you really need hard drives everywhere, or can you boot from tiny Flash disks, and only have one big RAID system in the server room? Do you really need desktop computers, or can laptops work better for everyone while drawing less power[1]?
You save several ways, if the above works. First your utility bills go down. Second, environmental impact goes down. Third, you can buy smaller UPSes and generators. After figuring all the above you can get by with smaller air conditioning units. Don't be afraid to buy one big power hungry server that can do the job on less power than the 50 other servers it replaces, if that happens to be the case.
Even if the above doesn't apply today, keep considering it. Maybe tomorrow you can replace power hungry systems for more economical ones.
[1]Laptops draw less power, but I reccomend you put a separate monitor, keyboard, and mouse on everyone's desk.
Unless your dummy load store energy somewhere else (for instance chemical, by electrolysis of water, or mechanical, by filling compressed air tanks, or pumping water higher etc) all of it goes to heat. Almost all household and computer applicances are like this - the heat dissipation is equal to the draw. Computers, heaters, TVs, DVDs, playstations, light bulbs.
It's even true of stuff like your refrigerator, or the pump on your fishtank - but in those cases you have to average over time at steady state for it to work out.
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I've already started buying low power equipment just to drop the heat generation to give our aircon a fighting chance. I'm sure you'll have heaps of reasons why you've got to have exactly the equipment you've got, but have a really good think about how you might reduce power requirements and you'll probably find something that won't adversely affect your business as much as, say, moving.
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In the UK, the supplier owns the service fuse and the meter, the customer owns everything connected to the other side of the meter. The max current you can draw is the rating of the service fuse (typically 100A). Large buildings have a 3 phase supply which means you can spread the load across the 3 phases (so you get 300A)
Actually, that really is another thing to consider. When you're selecting a server room, you want not only good dependable power, but proper airflow and ventilation. I have a backroom with only a few servers, a bunch of switches, and other networking+A/V equipment. For awhile in the winter it got quite cold, I moved out of my normal office area and hooked my laptop up off one of the switches directly: nice and cozy.
In the summer though, that room is a bit warm. I could definately see how a company with several servers could be in for overheating issues without proper ventilation. Even desktops in an office can cause significant heat output (especially in combination with hot, sweat, smell humans).
This is very good advice, but I would add a third party -- the HVAC people, and if you have chilled water that is maintained by another party, have them show up as well. That is a very good idea. And come to the meeting knowing how much the current draw is for each of your machines + 20%.
On another topic, the air filters that most HVAC companies and folks use are really, really crappy. It is worth the extra money to budget to get good air filters (we use 3M Filtrete air filters in our building and we no longer have any fine dust in the servers). Or, reserve down time to blow dust out of the systems a few times a year.
Go to the town hall, or whatever they have. Ask to see if any electrical plans were filed for the building. If not, it's probably a small building, and you could probably just ask to go down to the basement and look at the breakers yourself. Yes, it's true, the breakers might provide more juice than the wiring can handle, but you do have insurance, right?
Use ohms law to figure out power consumption. e=i*r volts = amps * ohms or p=e*i Power(in watts) = volts * amps Oh..... Just go here: http://www.grc.nasa.gov/WWW/K-12/Sample_Projects/O hms_Law/ohmslaw.html
or here:
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This is just a general model. Don't try this at home, folks. I assume slash dotters are tech savvy, but that doesn't mean we all know the above test could be very dangerous. As ka9dgx points out, you'd max out at a couple of thousand joules a second (assuming ~115V) and that could be dangerous.
...speaking of joules ... if water has a high specific heat capacity AND is a good conducter, you could add a liquid heat sysnc by putting a tub of water in series with the circuit, thus dissipating the heat more safely. This is just a theory.
Although
Open the sockets up. I've seen bare sockets attached directly to the woodwork, no plastic or metal case around them. (Makes for fun times when the roof leaks.)
If the socket covers are painted on, cut the paint. Don't let that stop you.
Check the wiring. If the circuit breaker is rated for 30 amps, but the wiring is 16 gauge and rated at 15 amps, you've got flamebait. (Wiring will ignite before anything else fails. Fire will be inside the walls.)
Just because it's a three-prong outlet doesn't mean ground is actually connected. Buy one of those $10 outlet testers. Check EVERYTHING.
On a standard two-outlet port, don't assume just because the top outlet has power, the bottom one will too. That's not always the case... (Did I mention check EVERYTHING?)
Buy an RF outlet-tracer and some walkie-talkies. Plug the tracer in EVERYWHERE. Have your partner see which breakers each one goes to.
Alternatively, buy a bunch of those cheap nightlights. Plug them in everywhere. Turn off the breakers one by one. See how many outlets share the same breaker. As a plus, by analyzing how loudly your neighboring tenants complain, you'll learn of shared power feeds.
LOOK. Look behind panels. Look inside false ceilings. Look under pull-up floors. Look wherever you can. I'll never forget one place that had four fuseboxes, all cross-linked. We knew about three of them. The fourth was inside a false ceiling.
Try every switch. You never know which ones might control some power outlets. Better now than later. "What does this switch do?" "I dunno" "Hey, what happened to the server!"
Hire an electrician. Or even just a home inspector. You never know when Billy-Bob decided that he could do that electrical stuff himself, and save a buck or two...
Heaters or hair dryers are much cheaper per watt, plus no worries about how to plug them or safety.
Once when testing a power supply I was building I just used unspooled wire in water. If it was on the spool it would have started smoking in no time but this way it just heated the water. The power supply did 35 V DC. Now try that with 120 VAC; that should be even more scary!
..that you should get checked (by a professional), but the earth impedance (grounding) too. Socket by socket.
All modern IT devices that draw significant power use switch mode power supplies, which tend to have horrible power factors. One of the side effects is a large amount of noise injection back onto the mains supply, harmonics of which end up on the grounding wiring via the capacitors in the input filters on every piece of kit.
Why you should care: obviously safety first, but potential differences between local grounds can end up having nasty effects on networks. Every piece of wire and connection presents some impedance, so two items of kit grounded some distance apart can end up with small but significant potential differences between them. Common-mode noise problems can result. Ever had problems with, say, USB hubs that don't behave properly, or reset when you turn the monitor on, only to find they are plugged-in remotely from the attached kit? This is one reason.
As an aside, drawing high power using a bunch of SMPS can lead to problems with harmonic currents overloading the neutral; fires have resulted in the past. Google for 'triplen harmonic problems'; in both the US and Europe it is becoming common practice in new-build offices to specify grossly-oversized neutrals for this very reason (yes I am an architect).
I'm surprised that no one offered the simple answer, hire an electrical engineer. The basic theory that you need to know to calculate this is in the NEC (National Electrical Code) but knowledge doesn't equal design experience. You would need to know how much load you were allowed from the main breaker and how the electricity is distributed from the main breaker throughout the building.
Then you would have to know how much load you had and how you actually wanted to distribute it (as opposed to how it is currently distributed). Any one horse electrical design firm should be able to calculate this and produce drawings for you (never underestimate the power of drawings!) in less than a week.
If you are going to need to run cat5 cable anyway, this would be the best method. The engineer could easily add the patch panel numbers to the drawing as well. It shouldn't cost more than a few grand, and they will often handle getting contractors, plus they are liable if something goes wrong.
The answer is simple go out and buy 30 space heaters. Buy the size that will fit under your typical secretary's desk. "Why," you ask? Well the answer is quite simple actually. That's exactly what will happen in your office once cold weather sets in. I can no longer count on one hand the number of times I've seen this happen (all within one company!). A secretary or receptionist gets cold and brings in a small 1000w space heater and plugs it in under her desk. More often than not she simply plugs it into any available outlet which probably going to be that bright orange, red, or dotted outlet that indicates it's on one of your battery and generator protected circuits. She and her neighbor come in at 7:30 and both flip them on at the same time and "WHAAAM!," the breaker flips on the server farm or wiring closet. I swear every battery/generator outlet should be protected with a key lock of some sort. Grrr.....
Watch out for circuits shared with other tenants or the building's common areas or HVAC. Our server room power was taken down a few times because of a shared circuit.
Try to get a lease clause put in that your office circuits are marked as "Call xxx-xxxx before turning off these circuits".
if it's wired wrong, there could be a fun fire in the process!
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