How much does power go for nowadays ?

Tue Aug 30 11:50:32 PDT 2005

>
> It depends on how it is quoted.
>
> Is that with air conditioning costs?  -  Air conditioning can take up 
> to twice the amount of power you use to suck out the heat on your load.
>
> Is that "breakable" or "usable" amps? -  A typical drop into a cab 
> will be one or more 20 amp circuits.  For a 20 amp breaker, you can 
> only use 2/3's of its rating or 16 amps.  Many places will say you 
> have a 20 amp circuit and give you a quote for "$16 per amp" and 
> multiply this against the full 20 amp number.  In this case $320 per 
> 20 amp circuit.  If they are figuring your use of 16 amps then the 
> price will be $256.  Also, most colos will assume you are pulling the 
> full load when billing.  A few Colos will have smart PDUs that can 
> measure what you are using.  You can try to arrange a deal where you 
> only pay for what you are using.
>
> If you are leasing a bunch-o-racks, ask the colo to put a sub-tenet 
> meter in for you that monitors your racks.  This should be easy for 
> the colo if you take up enough racks to fill your own breaker panel.
>
> BTW... As another data point, we (UnitedLayer) charges about $250 for 
> a 20 amp drop.

As an interesting comparison,  110v @ 365main runs about $16 per amp, 
and it is billed actual usage (They refuse to do fixed-price on power 
since their costs go up and down). It's pretty consistent. A
customer of mine uses about 250 amps and gets just under a $4k per month 
power bill. 365 has one heck of a power setup, I'm actually surprised at 
how cheap their power is.  Last month I used 30 amps of power, and
I believe my last power bill was about $480. In the winter it seems to 
go down a bit.

AFAIK, datacenters in California aren't allowed to mark-up power due to 
PUC regulation , so the price of power should be a good indication of 
the quality of your datacenter, or at least of their power infrastructure.

Michael T. Halligan
Chief Technology Officer
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BitPusher, LLC
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