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!