A Way To Cut My Power Use & One Of My Favorite Kickstarters In A While

[L_A_G]

Seems incredibly simple, but having probably watched too many DefCon talks made by penetration testers I'm slightly worried that the author won't be able to secure it properly, leaving the door open for vandalism. I can imagine the kind of frustration and confusion that would result from somebody just going around and randomly powering up or down and resetting other peoples' systems.

If you don't know what kind of talks that I'm talking about, I'm talking about these kinds of talks:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-cZ7eDV2n5Y

Seeing a big company screw up like with the remote management system shown off here, I can only imagine how badly a single high school student can screw up.

[asdfblah]

Can't you just use any USB-to-network device that supports WOL?

[budric]

Dem ESP8266 modules...

Thank you! Looks awesome.

[adler187]

considering the server room heats my house in the winter

Although electric heating is 100% efficient, it tends to be more expensive compared to other forms of heating, since the electricity is generated in a less efficient manner than just burning the fuel directly. Additionally, you're running computers that generate waste heat, but they're not 100% efficient, since some (hopefully most, actually) of that energy is going towards computation and not heat. DoE has a good writeup here: http://energy.gov/energysaver/electr...stance-heating Sure as a byproduct of doing your testing if you don't have to heat your house with a furnace, that's a good benefit, but I wouldn't consider leaving idle machines on just for heating.

[tigerroast]

What about also some photovoltaic panels?

PV panels are still expensive (amazingly enough, unless energy companies are just making a monster dollar off of us), and that's before talking about the installation of said panels and electrical work required just to not overload any appliances (e.g. servers and systems being benchmarked). He could also opt for a backup power supply (like the Powerwall once Tesla stops lagging), but that's just piling on the costs.

Michael managed to build a fancypants server room out of a basement, but I have no idea if electric work is in his playbook. Which it very well could be, but I digress. Matter of fact, he did comment in an article about solar panels being too high of an upfront investment.

[elect]

PV panels are still expensive (amazingly enough, unless energy companies are just making a monster dollar off of us), and that's before talking about the installation of said panels and electrical work required just to not overload any appliances (e.g. servers and systems being benchmarked). He could also opt for a backup power supply (like the Powerwall once Tesla stops lagging), but that's just piling on the costs.

Michael managed to build a fancypants server room out of a basement, but I have no idea if electric work is in his playbook. Which it very well could be, but I digress. Matter of fact, he did comment in an article about solar panels being too high of an upfront investment.

If he plans to run for more than the Payback Time (around 6/7 years) than it is economically convenient

[chrisb]

Although electric heating is 100% efficient, it tends to be more expensive compared to other forms of heating, since the electricity is generated in a less efficient manner than just burning the fuel directly. Additionally, you're running computers that generate waste heat, but they're not 100% efficient, since some (hopefully most, actually) of that energy is going towards computation and not heat.

The energy that goes towards computation ends up as heat too. http://superuser.com/questions/14807...-in-a-computer

[speculatrix]

I live in England, and I heat my house with natural gas in winter, and it's roughly half the price of electricity. I don't have air-con in the house, and I'd only need it for a month at most anyway. The waste heat is useful for four months of the year.

Electricity is about US$0.15 per kWH, or, very roughly, it means a continuous load of 1W for a whole year is US$1.50. This means if I can invest $50 in power-saving measures it needs to save between 20 and 50W to make a reasonable ROI.