The farm is getting a UPS!

[fallwind]

UPDATE: SEE POST# 17

Well it's summer time again and that usually means lightning storms and power outages here on the prairies. I've run my WCG farm for years with nothing but cheap surge supressors and I've been lucky, only lost one PSU in that time due to power failures. But now that I have some serious money invested in hardware, it's time to protect it with a quality UPS. Since all my machines now run on 240 volts, it took some investigating but I think I finally found a UPS that will work with North American style split phase 240v and has enough firepower to handle the farm.

Here she is stretched out on my workbench, a brand new HP R3000H 2700 watt 2U UPS bought for $200 on eBay ($1700 retail+tax and shipping here in Canada)!!!



Measurements are 24"L x 17.5"w x 3.5"h. Heavy sucker too! Took me and the UPS driver to lug it off the truck...lol!



A pic of the rear panel. It has 9 C13 outlets, the same kind of connection you find on PSU's. There's enough there to hook up my 6 rigs, the cooling system PSU and one LCD monitor with 1 outlet to spare. I estimate my farms power draw at 1500w so this UPS should give me about 12 minutes of runtime but I'll likely set it up to initiate OS shutdown after 1-2 minutes. If the power isn't back on after 1-2 minutes, it likey is going to be off for a while anyways. The power plug is a 20A twist-lock and there's also a 20A outlet on the right to run a power distribution unit, but I don't have a need for that.



Now to integrate it into the farm!



Please excuse the dirty floor! This is my garage, not my house...lol! My first thought was to just reinforce the top shelf and put it up there and set the monitor on top, but I would have had to add too much lumber which would just get in the way during maintenance and upgrades. So I built a sturdy floor stand out of 2x4's. The rear attaches to the wall studs and the front sits on it's own legs. There's also a couple cross braces to help support the UPS across the middle. I could have just put it on the floor but this way it's protected from water and I can still store stuff underneath.

It's not connected yet, I'm still waiting for the C13/C14 jumper cables and a serial card from NCIX and of course no one in this hick town had a twist lock 20A receptacle so I had to special order one too. I'm still not 100% sure this thing will work properly with split-phase 240v but that's easy enough to figure out once it's powered on and charged up. I'll updated this thread in a week or so once I have the data.

[fallwind]

Reserved....

[Movieman]

Did I ever tell you how much I love your farm?
Nice score on the UPS..

[7Losses]

Man that looks damn cool!

[[XC] Oj101]

A bong cooled farm, damn you're Xtreme I LOVE it

[Plan.B]

Nice setup. And nice workbench.

[shoota]

too awesome!

[aztec]

"The farm is getting a UPS!"

...and all the farm animals lived happily ever after...


Hey, wack set up there!!

[retro77]

No need to put things like monitors on the UPS, just put it on surge. That way your UPS will last those few seconds longer.

[fallwind]

The monitor is turned off 99% of the time, I only turn it on once or twice a day to check in on things. Battery life really isn't a concern though. The UPS is there mainly to protect against brown outs and power "flickers" that we get during lightning storms. If the power goes out completely, the rigs will be programmed to shut down after a minute or 2. I'd need a backup generator to crunch through a power outage and even I'm not that xtreme...lol!

[=[PULSAR]=]

Sweet farm fallwind! Can we get a close up shot of the cooling. Looks very innovative

[Dave's Mom]

Well it's summer time again and that usually means lightning storms and power outages here on the prairies. I've run my WCG farm for years with nothing but cheap surge supressors and I've been lucky, only lost one PSU in that time due to power failures. But now that I have some serious money invested in hardware, it's time to protect it with a quality UPS. Since all my machines now run on 240 volts, it took some investigating but I think I finally found a UPS that will work with North American style split phase 240v and has enough firepower to handle the farm.

Here she is stretched out on my workbench, a brand new HP R3000H 2700 watt 2U UPS bought for $200 on eBay ($1700 retail+tax and shipping here in Canada)!!!



Measurements are 24"L x 17.5"w x 3.5"h. Heavy sucker too! Took me and the UPS driver to lug it off the truck...lol!



A pic of the rear panel. It has 9 C13 outlets, the same kind of connection you find on PSU's. There's enough there to hook up my 6 rigs, the cooling system PSU and one LCD monitor with 1 outlet to spare. I estimate my farms power draw at 1500w so this UPS should give me about 12 minutes of runtime but I'll likely set it up to initiate OS shutdown after 1-2 minutes. If the power isn't back on after 1-2 minutes, it likey is going to be off for a while anyways. The power plug is a 20A twist-lock and there's also a 20A outlet on the right to run a power distribution unit, but I don't have a need for that.



Now to integrate it into the farm!



Please excuse the dirty floor! This is my garage, not my house...lol! My first thought was to just reinforce the top shelf and put it up there and set the monitor on top, but I would have had to add too much lumber which would just get in the way during maintenance and upgrades. So I built a sturdy floor stand out of 2x4's. The rear attaches to the wall studs and the front sits on it's own legs. There's also a couple cross braces to help support the UPS across the middle. I could have just put it on the floor but this way it's protected from water and I can still store stuff underneath.

It's not connected yet, I'm still waiting for the C13/C14 jumper cables and a serial card from NCIX and of course no one in this hick town had a twist lock 20A receptacle so I had to special order one too. I'm still not 100% sure this thing will work properly with split-phase 240v but that's easy enough to figure out once it's powered on and charged up. I'll updated this thread in a week or so once I have the data.

Dirty Floor!! OMG that is the neatest worktable I've seen, and we have a few PCs running here. Upstairs/downstairs, there are parts everywhere. nag, nag, nag.
in my house.

[CmB]

That is sweet. I'm in awe actually.

[Movieman]

The monitor is turned off 99% of the time, I only turn it on once or twice a day to check in on things. Battery life really isn't a concern though. The UPS is there mainly to protect against brown outs and power "flickers" that we get during lightning storms. If the power goes out completely, the rigs will be programmed to shut down after a minute or 2. I'd need a backup generator to crunch through a power outage and even I'm not that xtreme...lol!

My 5500w generator is in the garage and ready to go..
Gives app 30 amps, enough to run the house on a light load and keep a couple PC's running..

[sRHunt3r]

Sweet score Fallwind, congrats and that is one mean farm

[fallwind]

Sweet farm fallwind! Can we get a close up shot of the cooling. Looks very innovative

These pics are from about a year ago, different PC hardware but cooling equipment remains the same.

Here's a closeup of one of the return lines to the pipe that carries water back up to the radiator. The pipe is just plain 1.5" ABS drain pipe and the 1/2" ABS hose adapter is known as a "dishwasher adapter". If you have a dishwasher, you'll have one of these under your sink, the 1/2" fitting will point up though.



This is the right side of the shelf showing the cold water pipe and the connection to one of the MCP-655 pumps. Again, nothing fancy, just more ABS pipe and standard PC cooling gear. From here the tubing just leapfrogs across 3 waterblocks to the return pipe on the left side pictured above. You can also see my old 120v outlet. I've since installed another outlet to the left of this one that carries 240v which helps improve PSU efficiency. The coolant looks orange because I used to use a 90/10 mix of distilled/antifreeze for biocide. I've since switched to pure distilled and silver for biocide. The entire system holds about 2 gallons of water. Another nice feature is the ease of system bleeding. I just fill it up, turn on the pumps and it's bled of air in about 5 seconds....lol!



A little blurry but this is a threaded end cap on the bottom of each ABS pipe. To drain the entire loop, I just place a bucket underneath and spin off the caps.



Here's one of the connections to the radiator. I pieced together some fittings at the hardware store to turn the 1.5" ABS into a 1.25" barbed hose fitting and then spliced it to the rad with some radiator hose.




The radiator is out of a 1988 Nissan Maxima, got it from a local rad shop used for $50. Took an afternoon to clean it inside and out but otherwise it was in good shape. The trick to using a car rad is finding an older one made out of brass and copper since newer rads usually have an aluminum core. The fans are overkill but I run them off the 3.3v rail on the PSU so they're fairly quiet and only draw about 20w at that speed.

[fallwind]

Update time!!! The UPS is wired up and working perfectly! It took some time to get it configured correctly and figure a few things out but this server grade stuff is really sweet to work with once it's running! My biggest fear was that the batteries would be shot because the UPS was over a year past it's next recharge date but they charged up fine and I did a 4 minute battery test with a 1400w power draw and it held up fine with 50% battery capacity left at the end, which matched up nicely with it's predicted runtime of 9 min. See the screen shots below of the management software.

All that's left now it to track down an SNMP card. This gives the UPS access to my LAN and allows it to send signals to the attached rigs to shut down gracefully in the event of a power failure.



Check out the total output power!! 1432 watts for 3 Gulftowns at 4.2, 3 920's at 4.0, 2 pumps, 19" LCD, 2 massive rad fans, network switch, etc. When I shut the LCD off it actually drops below 1400w. I know the entire cooling system draws about 100w so 1300w or 217w/rig including PSU losses is pretty impressive.

[Jaco]

that is very little electric for your output

must be the one of the most efficient farms

[fallwind]

The farm is in my garage and does about 280-290k PPD, the rest of my output (110k PPD) comes from me and the wifes rig in my house.