Solar powered server rack
Solar powered server rack
Has anyone gotten their server rack to run off solar power.
I got the idea after seeing the Anker solix systems on sale at costco and thought what if I could get one of those to power my server rack and have a few rigid solar panels on the roof to charge the battery up during the day and run the server partially during the night off the battery, but switch over to grid power when it runs dry?
Curious if anyone has any experience with that, I'm not looking to do my whole house just my server rack for now, from my limited tracking of my rack it looks like it uses 8kwh a day so it seems possible. Searching online it looks like there are much cheaper battery options than anker
How reliable do you need to be - https://solar.lowtechmagazine.com/ often goes offline because there wasn't enough sun to keep their servers up - would this be acceptable for your servers? (you should spend a lot of time on that website when it is up - it will teach you more than anyone else here)
Will you allow yourself to plug in the backup if there isn't much sun for a few days (either yourself or some automatic system) - just the ability to go 20 hours on battery and enough solar to recharge the battery in 4 hours on a sunny day would get most people to 90% solar and will be a lot cheaper than chasing to 100% solar all the time - but that might not be good enough for you.
The general rule of thumb if you never can go down is you need to be able to run for 2 weeks without any sun, and enough solar to then recharge those batteries when there is 4 hours of full sun. Of course the weather where you live makes a difference. If you live in the desert your worst possible day will always be followed by a day where you can completely recharge the battery so you need much less batteries; while those who live in arctic locations will not get any sun for a couple months and so need a lot more storage.
I like your thoughts on runtime and recharge time.
That four hour limit really outs things into perspective for someone just starting out. Most people don't understand the constraints at first.
You can maybe stretch that 4 hours to several days. However you must get enough solar in 4 hours to provide more than 1 day of use. You will probably get to 6-8 hours of production from your panels, but the production is reduced in the off hours and there are almost always a few clouds reducing your output even at peak times so until proved otherwise just count on 4 hours. (prove can be several years worth of data, or careful local climate calculation possibly with various devices to handle the sun moving)
That's an awesome link, thanks!
You might be interested in this project where someone has hooked up a low-power system to Mastodon and is tooting through it stories about the experience. The project author may also be worth contacting.
That's really neat thank you!
Those "Solar generator" systems are all grossly overpriced. Look at something like this instead
Yeah, running it like that here. Works fine for the most part, except that the hybrid inverter that I bought advertised "UPS" mode, but it doesn't actually switch fast enough to avoid also adding a proper UPS (but running an UPS chained is another issue...).
It sounds a bit strange as it does actually run off the battery all the time (unless below the minimum charge limit, when it seamlessly switches to grid power automatically), but due to legal requirements it needs to switch to another supply mode when the grid power fails and this switch is not entirely seamless on my inverter.
interesting, I do have a UPS on my rack already so chaining it isnt an issue. everything is plugged into the UPS now so I was imagining just unplugging the UPS from the wall and into the anker box, then just figuring out how to add enough solar panels to power the rack but also charge the battery
The recommendation to not daisy-chain UPSs together is less about what makes for a cleaner setup and more about not damaging them.
https://www.eaton.com/us/en-us/support/eaton-answers/daisy-chain-ups.html
If the battery inverter in the Anker box doesn't pass through grid power then I think you would use an automatic transfer switch that switches between mains and battery inverter depending on which is powered. I had dreams of offsetting my homelab power with solar + battery + inverter.
If I were you, I'd start with a system that just lets you run off solar during the day. Have just enough batteries to stabilize the voltage. Set the charge controller to never drop below 80% charge.
Then add batteries over time, if you want.
This is a really cool idea! I'd be careful of anker quality. I heard it went downhill some since being bought out. I still use their chargers primarily though.
A solar cluster and whole house battery bank would do this for the majority of the day. You need to hook it into your AC circuit with microinverters, and then have a circuit switch to handoff power back and forth. You'd at least be sure to run off solar during the day.
You could probably use yours for the same, but you need that AC transfer circuit into your breakers. Never do anything like this without an electrician.
I believe mailbox.org is all renewable, and I'm pretty sure it's solar.
But you need a massive battery bank to run stuff, batteries have a limited lifespan (especially the crap used in a UPS).
It's not cheap, you generally want to overbuild everything, and there are ongoing costs (hardware failures, batteries, etc).
But it can be done. Just have to do the math for your max power draw, then how much uptime you need determines the size of your battery bank and number of panels (which is influenced by how much sun you get/how consistent it is). You need enough panels to run your system and charge batteries, given the limitations of sun availability.
The sun always shines on pc.
I have an ALLPOWERS R600 hooked up to my server rack. It has built-in UPS and will switch to the battery, if the power goes.
However, I also have solar, with its own battery bank + an ATS.
I don’t have the ALLPOWERS setup to provide power from its batteri. Only in case of power failure from the house.